U.S. District judge Beryl Howell ruled that art created by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted. The judge was ruling in a case involving Stephen Thaler who had filed for U.S. patents that were created by his AI program called DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). Thaler has also filed in other countries and met with similar outcomes.
IP (Intellectual Property) is a favorite tool of the corporatocracy that is the reality for most nation-states today, including America. This writer believes that the balance of power between large scale systems and small-scale systems has tilted dramatically towards the small scale, meaning small scale operations can come closer and closer to quality and sophistication to what large scale systems were previously exclusively able to execute.
With the rise of technologies like 3D printing, and even deep learning, open source A.I., small-scale operations are becoming increasingly more competitive with large-scale systems, with less upfront overhead costs to get started and with far more flexibility in response to changing circumstances than large-scale systems can manage.
These large-scale systems are run by a handful of families that enjoy the significant advantage they have over most of the people in whatever nation-state they are competing with. These families are becoming increasingly aware of the growing technological potential power of the people they could once easily out-compete against and exploit. Now, they are looking to tools like Intellectual Property laws to protect them from the masses.
With IP protections, a mega-corporation can assure that small-scale operators don’t have access to these technologies since they’re “protected” by the state using IP laws as their protection.
Even though the Judge in this case ruled against AI being able to develop their own IP, this writer fears that it is only a matter of time before a court in America somewhere allows AI to get that IP, or at least allows the creators of the AI that created the IP to have the IP.
Right now, the advantage in the AI arms race is still in favor of large-scale systems, whose managers fully intend on using IP to race through “discoveries” so they can lock down emerging tech and keep it artificially protected against small-scale operator use.
China appears to be doing some form of this right here in America, attempting to “discover” as many seed variants as they can that they can file patents for, protecting seeds from small-scale, or even American, use, using our own systems to do so. We covered that development in a previous report.
The individual attempting to set such a dangerous precedent may or may not be doing the work of some large-scale system, but regardless, whether he is aware of it or not, he is doing the world of the powerful few attempting to keep humanity from being able to make fire on their own without paying the elites a fee to do so.
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