The Private Capture of Public Genius
5 hours ago
- #Antitrust History
- #AI Ethics
- #Public Goods
- AT&T, as a regulated monopoly, funded Bell Labs, enabling decades of groundbreaking innovations.
- The 1956 antitrust settlement forced AT&T to open its patents royalty-free, catalyzing industries like semiconductors and Silicon Valley.
- AI frontier labs (like OpenAI and Anthropic) train models on vast internet data, claiming fair use and transformative value.
- Legal battles around AI training data focus on fair use, market harm, and the lack of retroactive consent from content creators.
- The internet's value as a corpus is a public good, but AI harvesting threatens participation and integrity of its layers.
- Current models cannot attribute individual contributions, making proportional payment impossible, yet value extraction is undeniable.
- A Corpus Royalty—a fixed share of AI lab revenues paid to the public—is proposed as restitution for unjust enrichment.
- Historical precedents like Alaska Permanent Fund and Superfund show collective solutions for shared resource exploitation.
- The royalty addresses unattributable creativity, ensuring the public shares in the upside of AI's reliance on collective genius.