IP can't save you from AI

ID: 7f8f5780
原文链接: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/
分类: industry
来源类型: article
标签: copyright, ai-policy, labor-rights, privacy, spirit-airlines
质量评分: 4/5
抓取时间: 2026-08-20T00:00:00+08:00 (fetched via opencli)

中文导读

Cory Doctorow 借 Spirit Airlines 破产案论证“扩大版权挡不住 AI”：清算人把全体员工的工作邮件、日历、备忘录打包卖给 Google 用于 AI 训练——每封邮件都有版权，但劳动合同的 works made for hire 条款让版权归公司。对照 2001 年 Enron 破产后的 Enron Corpus 隐私灾难，他的结论是版权从来是可转让的财产权而非劳动权；真正挡住 AI 的是 Writers Guild 式集体谈判，把训练禁令写进版权法只会让雇主多一笔授权收入。

为什么值得关注

Spirit 破产数据卖给 Google 训练 AI：版权是财产权不是劳动权，挡不住任何东西

Summary (English)

Cory Doctorow uses the Spirit Airlines bankruptcy to argue that expanding copyright cannot shield workers from AI: the estate sold all employee emails, calendars and memos to Google for AI training - every email copyrighted, but work-for-hire clauses put those rights in the company's hands. Echoing the privacy disaster of the post-2001 Enron Corpus, he concludes copyright has always been a transferable property right, not a labor right; what actually checked AI was the Writers Guild's bargaining, and writing training bans into copyright law mostly hands employers a new licensing revenue stream.

图片

Excerpt

Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

发布时间: September 17, 2023

原文链接: https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/18/enron-corpus/

Today's links

IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights.
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Colophon: All the rest.

IP can't save you from AI (permalink)

You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" _can_ be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that _they_ believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is a losing strategy. First, because banning scraping, or requiring permission to count the elements in creative works, or demanding a license to publish collections of facts about copyrighted works will inflict enormous collateral damage on a wide variety of socially beneficial activities. From the OED to search engines to the Internet Archive, so many beneficial activities rely on the fact that copyright permits unlicensed collection and analysis of every copyrighted work as a single, massive corpus, and copyright allows the publication of that analysis without permission from the creators of the works it analyzes.

A lot of people who are (rightfully) very angry about AI dispute this. They believe that they can craft an "AI training" law that would ban scraping, analysis and publication when these activities are part of AI training, but not when they're undertaken for a benign purpose. I am very, very skeptical of this. After 25 years of watching internet policy go badly awry, to the great detriment of workers of all kinds and everyday users, it is my professional, considered opinion that drafting a statute that only stops these "bad" activities is much, much harder than these people think, and may actually be impossible.

I think some artists advocating for a copyright-based solution to AI's war on labor understand this and have decided that they're willing to catch a lot of dolphins in these legal tuna-nets they're hoping to get from Congress. I get that: there are always trade-offs, and the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

But I think they're making the wrong trade-off, and not just because I value archives, accountability corpuses, large-scale linguistic research and search engines. I think they're making the wrong trade-off because _copyright will not protect their livelihoods from AI-based wage erosion_.

Here's why: the theory of copyright as an "artist's right" is premised on the idea that we artists get these exclusive rights, which we use in our bargaining with media companies and other intermediaries. It's a (pseudo) property right, and it's sub-licensable. Just as an entrepreneur might get the contract to supply catering for a sports stadium and then parcel out the pretzel stand, beer bar, and pizza concessions to subcontractors, we're meant to sell our English rights, foreign language rights, graphic novel rights, film rights, audio rights, (and so on) to a variety of media companies.

To bargain successfully, it's not only necessary for you to have something valuable to trade: you also need to have _leverage_. You need to have _options_. The other side has to believe that if they lowball you, you will go do a deal elsewhere.

This is where copyright fails to serve creative workers. Even at the best of times, the world naturally produces an oversupply of would-be professional artists, and a sufficiency of the talented to fill most of the workaday niches in our field. Even exceptional artists – and exceptional works of art – are often commercial flops, for reasons that aren't always well understood (though sometimes it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a media company buys the rights and then loses confidence in the work and does not exert itself in the marketing of the work).

These are not the best of times. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement has boiled the "creative industries" down to 5 publishers, 4 studios, 3 labels, 2 app stores, and one company that's in charge of all the ebooks and audiobooks.

Since the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress has acted time and again to broaden copyright. Today's copyright lasts longer, restricts more uses, extends to more kinds of works, and carries stiffer statutory penalties for infringement ($150,000 per download!). The media companies we creative workers bargain with are larger, richer and more profitable than at any time in history – _and we are poorer_. The share of those massive profits that ends up in _our_ pocket is _lower_ than ever – and we don't just get smaller slices of that larger pie, those slices are smaller than the slices we _used_ to get, when the pie was much smaller. The rising tide of copyright expansion lifted our bosses' boats – even as our dinghies filled with bilge and sank.

How could we get so much more to bargain with, only to bargain it all _away_, for less money than we used to get for a much smaller bundle of rights? Simple: giving us rights did not give us _leverage_. Giving us more rights without giving us more bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch-money. There's no amount of lunch-money that will get that kid fed; but if you keep increasing how much money the kid gets, the bullies will end up so rich that they can afford to run a global campaign demanding that we all think of those poor hungry kids and send them even _more_ lunch money.

Copyright's failure to deliver for creative workers doesn't mean that we're doomed to poverty. Our works are generating _record_ profits for our bosses, and there are _plenty_ of ways to change the "distributional outcomes" (the phrase economists use for "who gets what") in arts/labor policy. In 2022, I co-wrote _Chokepoint Capitalism_ along with the eminent Australian copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin. The whole book is full of these pro-worker arts policies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

Rebecca and I start from the premise that artists are workers, not the small businesses that our bosses insist we see ourselves as. The idea that an artist is an LLC with an MFA fits in very neatly with copyright: you're getting this bundle of exclusive rights from Congress and then you bargain, business-to-business, with other companies out there in the world, selling those rights for the best price you can get. This approach rarely works, and when it does, it works badly. 50 years of more copyright, richer bosses, _and_ poorer artists put the lie to the "LLC with an MFA" approach.

If we're workers, then we derive our power from _labor_ rights. The Writers Guild – the only creative

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