Tuesday, September 01, 2026
EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype
Electronic Frontier Foundation: The history of technology is rife with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.
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I primarily agree with this article, that it would be hasty for any major copyright law changes to go into effect, and that if they were to go into effect there would surely be unforeseen side effects that would harm human, non-ai, artists. I do understand why artists are worried though. Many artists had no say in their work being fed to LLM’s as data and now have no control over software which has the capacity to recreate their works in ways that humans cannot. Still, I worry that if we add additional copyright protection for artists, that it will discourage creativity in other artists, who will be afraid of being harmed for taking inspiration from another artist. Until we see substantive harm done by AI’s having access to art, I see no reason to take legal action based purely on speculation. If there was significant harm, the situation could change.
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