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But the U.S. patent system has changed dramatically since then, and not coincidentally, just as "Big Tech" started to dominate the technology industry.

First, starting in 2014 with Alice Corp v. CLS Bank International, a series of Supreme Court decisions made it much harder to patent the kind of algorithmic innovations that made Google what it is today. In the years after the Alice decision, for example, denials of AI-related patents on grounds of ineligibility quadrupled. Indeed, under current law, Mr. Page's first patent would almost certainly be invalid.

Freshly minted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and his slender Republican majority may have a long list of legislation that they would like to see become law, but with a Democratic White House and Senate, they need to be strategic in what they pursue. While the two parties may seem to agree on relatively little, both Republicans and Democrats have indicated a result to take on the country’s economic dependence on China as well as to do more to help U.S. consumers get more for their income. Fortunately, the two parties could accomplish both goals with legislation that reformed intellectual property protections and with greater oversight of the International Trade Commission (ITC), a federal agency whose actions are harming innovators and opening the door to Chinese dominance of key US markets. Intellectual property is a pillar of innovation that drives America’s economic engine; IP-intensive industries accounted for of domestic economic activity in 2019. However, our patent system can be manipulated by economic opportunists who have no interest in actually using patents or IP to create anything. These companies—which are usually financed by hedge funds or other wealthy investors—acquire a portfolio of old (and often invalid) patents for the sole purpose of extracting settlements from productive domestic companies by pursuing litigation. Almost all patent infringement litigation can and should be dealt with in federal district court where the courts can directly discern whether a patent has been violated and award appropriate damages. However, patent opportunists have discovered that it is often possible to file patent lawsuits at the International Trade Commission, and that their odds of succeeding—or extracting a sizable settlement—are significantly higher there. Congress created the ITC in 1916 and Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 gave it quasi-judicial powers to protect U.S. industries and consumers from unfair trade practices arising from imported goods. But unlike the federal district courts, the ITC has only one remedy – an “exclusion order” — that bans categories of products from the U.S. market. The ITC may ban large swaths of products even if it finds even a minor patent infringement that has a marginal economic outcome. In fact, the strategy of these patent litigators has been to a small component, feature, or functionality in a highly complex, larger item. In the electronics sector, high-tech devices such as computers, televisions, and cell phones contain thousands of small components providing innumerable features and functionalities. Top of Form

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Pushing back against Big Tech's predatory practices will require a renewed effort to fortify America's patent system. Patents serve an essential purpose in the American economy—incentivizing investment in new ideas and technologies. By promising patent holders exclusive rights to their creations for a limited time, patents ensure that inventors have a chance to reap the rewards of successful products. But Big Tech—eager to entrench its dominance—has used its clout in Washington to systematically attack the U.S. patent system and disadvantage smaller rivals. Legislative changes, as well as a number of troubling rulings, have made it more difficult to obtain, defend and enforce patents. For instance, the America Invents Act, passed by in 2011, created a new review process for the patent office. This process usually adds years of delay and makes it considerably more costly to defend one's patents, and increases the risk of losing intellectual property rights—all under lower standards than applied in court.

For many years, Big Tech companies with their legions of DC lobbyists have been on a crusade to weaken the International Trade Commission (ITC), a little-known, independent, nonpartisan federal agency tasked with protecting the United States from imports that violate U.S. laws, including U.S. patent laws. These companies are now at it again, lobbying for a bill that was recently re-introduced in Congress: the Advancing America’s Interests Act (AAIA).

The AAIA would severely restrict the ITC’s ability to block imports manufactured in China that violate U.S. patents. The bill’s title, of course, is classic Washington Orwellian double-speak —this legislation would significantly undermine American innovators and U.S. interests.

Lobbying behavior/ To test this hypothesis, I reviewed and gathered evidence on the lobbying behavior of various technology-intensive industries. Historical examples show that large, integrated firms resisted strong patent protection in the late 19th-century railroad industry, as did large, integrated firms like IBM in the computing industry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both industries have in common the fact that incumbents offered a bundled package of intangible and tangible assets and therefore resisted patent protection that facilitated entry by suppliers of discrete components of that package. More recent evidence shows that some of the largest technology firms were among the most vigorous supporters of the America Invents Act. Enacted in 2011, that statute substantially expanded opportunities for third parties to contest the validity of patents, principally through the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It is likely not accidental that these same firms have been among the most active petitioners at the PTAB seeking to invalidate issued patents.

These judgements have shown Big Tech that infringement doesn’t come without legal consequences — but this solution might not have teeth for much longer. Instead of simply stopping their infringement and licensing rivals’ technologies fairly, major tech firms — including Apple and Google — are now pursuing a legal workaround. They’re trying to make it easier to invalidate rivals’ patents by pushing for legislation that would weaken IP protections. After all, if there are no patents, there can be no infringement.

Business as Usual

But Big Tech—eager to entrench its dominance—has used its clout in Washington to systematically attack the U.S. patent system and disadvantage smaller rivals.

Legislative changes, as well as a number of troubling Supreme Court rulings, have made it more difficult to obtain, defend and enforce patents. For instance, the America Invents Act, passed by Congress in 2011, created a new review process for the patent office. This process usually adds years of delay and makes it considerably more costly to defend one's patents, and increases the risk of losing intellectual property rights—all under lower standards than applied in court.

Amy Kapczynski, 2008, [Amy Kapczynski is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Faculty Co-Director of the Law and Political Economy Project, cofounder of the Law and Political Economy blog, and Faculty Co-Director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, “The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property” The Yale Law Journal, Volume 117, Issue 5, Retrieved from the University of Michigan Database, Accessed 7/27/24, S.A.M.]

The existence and success of the A2K mobilization likewise requires us to understand not just material interests, but how people collectively construct their sense of interests and opportunities, and how acts of framing can help groups to build support, recruit allies, and exert political leverage. Many of those involved in the A2K mobilization have acute material stakes in calling for changes in IP laws. Arcane aspects of patent law can be understood to affect the lives of people with AIDS in South Africa in a profoundly immediate way, for example. But even this fact, the frame-analytic perspective tells us, requires an act of interpretation before it can be the basis of political mobilization. In South Africa, for example, high government officials responded to the AIDS crisis and the high price of patented medicines not in an anti-IP frame, but in an “AIDS denialist” frame. 221 Other interpretations are possible, including the one offered by drug companies: that AIDS drugs are sophisticated and that their high cost represents their “true” price, when the massive expenditures and risk required for their development are considered. Why then did so many AIDS patients and access-to-medicines campaigners focus on IP as a problem and on international trade rules and companies as the proper register in which to respond? Posing this question helps to elucidate a broader point: the recent politicization of IP was not inevitable, even for those most directly and materially affected by strong IP laws. Rather, it is the result of movement-building dynamics that have their roots in intersections between expanding IP law and emergent frameworks of antiglobalization, human rights, environmentalism, and cyberutopianism. The access-to-medicines campaign, for example, both understood and built claims against strong patent laws through frameworks of international human rights discourse and corporate malfeasance.222 Farmers’ rights advocates tapped into environmental frameworks and the antiglobalization movement.223 The open-source and Creative Commons movements have drawn upon conceptions of the freedom of cyberspace and the abundance of the digital age. 224 All of these frameworks both helped orient these groups toward an understanding of IP as a problem and build bridges to others who might support their cause. Access-to-medicines campaigners could use the human rights frame to create connections with human rights organizations and institutions in Geneva and New York.225 Farmers’ rights campaigners’ arguments about sustainable development linked them to environmental groups. 226 Claims for protection of traditional knowledge were framed in a way that drew connections to indigenous rights claims. Thus, each of these groups mobilized frames that made certain alliances and political arguments possible. But these acts of framing also made other alliances more difficult— including some of the alliances that are beginning to emerge under the rubric of A2K. AIDS activists, for example, have drawn on humanitarian and human rights frames to argue that medicines are “essential” and categorically more important than cultural goods like “Barbie dolls or CDs.”227 Farmers’ rights groups often take strong stances against genetically modified organisms, in conflict with those who argue for open-source biotechnology on the grounds that it will allow scientists to engineer new products for poor farmers. 228 To the extent that groups concerned with farmers’ rights and traditional knowledge draw upon antitechnological discourses, this creates obvious possibilities for conflict with those advocates of free and open-source software who see in new digital technologies a revolution in the making. How and why, then, did groups working with such different frames build bridges to one another? As the next Part argues, these groups are being brought together through an encounter with IP law itself, operating here both as a form of constraint and as a field of meaning. Law has provided these groups with a frame—that of “intellectual property”—that encourages them to understand themselves as having similar problems and interests, and that facilitates joint countermobilization against the “IP industries.” This is, of course, somewhat ironic, given the purported power of the concept of IP to promote the agenda of rights holders. The paradoxical implication here is that the consolidation of the concept of intellectual property also created a scaffold for the creation of a broad countermovement. This comports with one of the central insights of dialogic framing theory, that groups borrow discourses from their opponents. It also suggests that successful acts of framing can help to consolidate ground for opposition as well as advance the framer’s cause.

It used to be that a round of golf followed by a round of thick steaks, stiff drinks and the promise of a campaign contribution were all it took for a lobbyist to butter up a lawmaker. But Congress put an end to these swanky meals and gifts in 2007, after a corruption scandal in which more than 20 lobbyists, political aides and public officials pleaded guilty or were convicted on federal charges. Though companies were still permitted to make campaign donations, the banning of gifts was a catastrophe for K Street, the avenue in Washington, D.C., where lobbyists have their offices. But it did not take long for K Street to figure out an ingenious way around the new rules. Today’s most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress with Chateau Margaux, five-star meals or tickets to professional sporting events. K Street’s elite now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you. Though appealing to the public has long been part of the lobbying playbook, it has taken a much more sophisticated form in the years since lobbyists were banned from using the traditional tools of their trade to curry favor with elected officials. They recognized that, given the new restrictions, the best way to influence members of Congress was through the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

With an election always just around the corner, members of Congress are uncomfortable taking actions that are not popular with voters back home. And they’re eager to support issues and causes that have—or appear to have—popular support among their constituents. With this incentive structure in mind, lobbyists began spending more of their time targeting ordinary people living thousands of miles outside the Beltway. They teamed up with PR gurus, social-media experts, political pollsters, data analysts and grassroots organizers to foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists’ corporate clients. A pivotal point in this evolution away from old-fashioned inside strategies to a more advanced “outside” approach occurred in 2011, during a battle pitting the then-upstart technology industry against the Goliaths of Washington’s corporate lobbying establishment. At the time, the tech industry was far from the dominant player it’s become today. But powerful corporate actors, from Hollywood to Wall Street, recognized the threat that Google and its peers might pose to their future profits and began searching for ways to undercut their new competitors. They saw an opportunity in pushing federal legislation to hold internet platforms legally liable for certain content put on their platforms by users. Though the legislation was relatively narrow in scope—it would have given law-enforcement authorities tools to crack down on websites that housed illegal or pirated content on servers in other countries—the internet companies and their allies presented it as an existential threat. The bill, known in the Senate as the PROTECT IP Act or PIPA, “would have destroyed the ecosystem of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr,” said Ernesto Falcon, who lobbied against the legislation at the time. Tech companies said the measure would force them to spend millions of dollars policing user-generated content, which would put many of them out of business and stifle the growth of the internet.

Google has spent more on lobbying than any other company in the computers and internet industry in 2012, continuing its exponential increase over the past few years. Google ranked eighth in the industry in 2008. Since then it has finished in the top five annually, climbing to third place in 2010 and first in 2011.

And it has already spent $4.7 million more for lobbying this year than last year, a substantial increase even given that $1.3 million of that was spent by its recently acquired subsidiary, Motorola Mobility.

We're now back full circle, except that while Gates helped himself to a few sheets of fanfold, Redmond's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman is claiming dibs on the open web and the content therein. It's "fair use" because of the "social contract" that anyone can copy anything – a novel legal argument of the sort only 1980s cyberpunks and 21st century giant corporations can make. Spoiler: Cyberpunk is dead and today's version rarely ends well either.

It's also remarkably short-sighted. It says that a huge body of work that absolutely does have copyright protection has had it removed by stealth. It hasn't; it is simply in Big AI's interests to strip legal protection from AI training data. Or so it thinks. In the indecent race to eat the world, those jockeying the apocalyptic horses either don't realize or don't care that lobbying for more anarchy in IP weakens protection they rely on.

TO THE EXTENT THAT THE DIGITAL TRADE AGENDA existed a decade ago, it flowed from copyright holders, like Hollywood studios, music labels, and software companies. They wanted tech platforms to be held responsible when website users published copyrighted material, and they made some headway. USTR negotiated the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and generally took the industry line that tech policy needed to protect intellectual property. This was a separate form of capture, of course, since copyright holders represented powerful industries.

Tech companies, who didn’t want the legal risk and compliance burden of constantly monitoring their sites for copyright infringement, devised a game plan. They formed the Internet Association, a lobbying group led by Amazon, Facebook, and Google. But they also joined existing organizations like the Coalition of Service Industries and the Information Technology Industry Council, which were familiar to trade negotiators.

[(Jonathan, Professor of Law at USC specializing in antitrust and intellectual property.) “Why Big Tech Likes Weak IP.”, Cato Institute, Spring 2021, https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2021/why-big-tech-likes-weak-ip]//LR

To appreciate the relative importance of patents for firms that specialize mostly in R&D, it is necessary to appreciate the relative unimportance of patents for firms that specialize in mostly everything else that is required to convert R&D into products and services that deliver value to end-users. For large, integrated firms with established market positions, various types of evidence indicate that, outside the biopharmaceutical and related life sciences industries, patents are generally not the leading tool used to capture value on innovation. This is not to say that these types of firms do not value patents; rather, they place less value on patents relative to other strategies by which to earn returns on intangible assets. Does this mean that the conventional free-rider justification for IP rights is unjustified? No, it means that larger firms outside the life sciences industries tend to have internal financing, production, distribution, and other non-IP-dependent capacities that are difficult for most other firms to replicate, which in turn may confer a competitive advantage even if the underlying technology is not securely protected as a legal matter. Even if a free-rider can produce one perfect copy of a BMW, it does not pose a competitive threat to BMW unless the free-rider can produce millions of copies at the same cost and with comparable financing, warranty protection, and post-purchase service capacities. Everything that I just said is not true, however, of a small biotech firm that has abundant expertise in developing a new medical therapy but lacks the capital and knowledge necessary to test, reproduce, and distribute that therapy on a mass scale and at a price point that will be acceptable to the target market. For firms that are smaller in size or have not integrated into the production and distribution stages of the technology supply chain, a robust patent portfolio is likely to be a critical predicate for entering into joint ventures and other relationships with potential sources of capital and commercialization expertise. This predicament reflects what is sometimes known as Arrow’s Paradox (originated by Nobel economics laureate Kenneth Arrow): it is impossible to transact over an innovation without disclosing it but, in doing so, the counterparty’s willingness to pay falls to zero because it can now replicate the innovation freely. While reputation effects can mitigate this outcome, there nonetheless remains a significant risk of knowledge leakage inherent to disclosing a firm’s “crown jewel” intellectual assets. Given this risk, weakening patent protection can significantly increase entry costs to the extent the innovator cannot use contractual relationships to secure the necessary capital and expertise and must therefore enter the market independently at every step of the supply chain. Lessons from Economic History If patents are especially critical to support innovation and enable entry by smaller, R&D-intensive firms, and not especially critical for larger firms with internal financing, production, and distribution capacities, then it should be expected that different levels of patent protection would affect the mix of business models used to support and monetize innovation in technology markets. Specifically, weak-IP environments would tend to be populated by larger firms that maintain mostly self-contained R&D, production, and distribution infrastructures, while strong-IP environments would tend to be populated by a greater diversity of organizational forms, including entities that specialize in R&D and rely on contractual relationships with third parties to execute the commercialization process. A history of U.S. patent strength/ Testing this hypothesis first requires assessing historical changes in the strength of patent protection (including changes attributable to patent-related changes in antitrust law). I studied the period from 1890 (the year the Sherman Act was enacted) through the mid-2000s, which then breaks down into three main periods based on various indicators of patent strength. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, courts were generally sympathetic toward patentees and antitrust law imposed few restraints on patent licensing. Starting in the late New Deal era and extending through the late 1970s, courts were generally hostile toward patentees, antitrust agencies made extensive use of compulsory licensing remedies, and antitrust case law imposed per se prohibitions on a variety of licensing practices. Starting in the early 1980s through the mid-2000s, the establishment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the enactment of the Bayh-Dole Act reinvigorated patent protections while the Chicago School revolution in antitrust law lifted most per se restrictions on licensing freedom. An organizational history of U.S. technology markets/ General trends in the mix of organizational structures observed in U.S. technology markets during these three periods conform approximately to my theoretical expectations. During the two periods of relatively strong patent protection, U.S. technology markets exhibited a wide range of organizational structures, which included smaller firms that funded R&D by securing investments from venture capital funds (or the late-19th century equivalent) and often commercialized innovations through licensing, assignment, or other transactions with larger firms that delivered critical production and distribution capacities. In contrast, the long period of weak patent protection exhibited a high degree of organizational uniformity. Innovation took place primarily in the laboratories of large, integrated firms, which were often supported by procurement relationships with, or R&D funding from, the U.S. military, NASA, and other government entities. Weakening patents can raise entry barriers and shelter incumbents by disadvantaging firms that are rich in ideas but weak in capital and business expertise. Patent strength and organizational distortions/ Contrary to the standard incentive justification for IP rights, this inquiry into the relationship between IP rights and organizational structure does not support the view that private investment in innovation declines significantly as patent protection diminishes (except for the life sciences industries). Rather, this analysis indicates that insecure patent protection can give rise to distortions in the organizational structures used to support innovation and commercialization activities. Specifically, weak-IP environments are hospitable for large, integrated firms that maintain internal markets for financing and conducting R&D and then embed the resulting intellectual output in goods and services for the end-user market. By contrast, strong-IP environments enable entry by smaller firms that specialize in R&D and monetize the resulting intellectual outputs through external relationships with third parties. This organizational distortion matters because larger firms tend to excel in incremental and process-related innovation that refines existing technologies while smaller firms tend to excel in product innovation that challenges existing technologies. The most striking examples are found in the biotechnology and semiconductor industries, in which patent-dependent business models have facilitated significant entry by R&D-specialist firms and a vertical disintegration of the market supply chain. Counterintuitively, a strong-IP environment can lower entry costs by relieving firms from having to assemble a production and distribution infrastructure in order to earn returns on R&D investments. This may explain why in 1966 (during the postwar weak-IP regime) small firms accounted for only about 5% of business R&D spending, but they accounted for almost 24% in 2006 (during the strong-IP regime starting in the early 1980s). Lessons from Political Economy As an empirical matter, it is notoriously difficult to establish definitively the extent to which patents are necessary to support innovation by particular firms or industries. I adopt an alternative approach that assesses the value that firms themselves place on patents as indicated by firms’ advocacy and lobbying actions. If it is true that patent protection facilitates entry by smaller and less integrated firms that specialize in R&D, we should expect to observe those firms expressing policy preferences favoring stronger IP rights. If it is true that larger and more integrated firms do not rely heavily on patents or can even derive competitive advantages through non-IP-dependent production and distribution capacities, we should expect to observe that those firms express policy preferences favoring weaker IP rights. Lobbying behavior/ To test this hypothesis, I reviewed and gathered evidence on the lobbying behavior of various technology-intensive industries. Historical examples show that large, integrated firms resisted strong patent protection in the late 19th-century railroad industry, as did large, integrated firms like IBM in the computing industry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both industries have in common the fact that incumbents offered a bundled package of intangible and tangible assets and therefore resisted patent protection that facilitated entry by suppliers of discrete components of that package. More recent evidence shows that some of the largest technology firms were among the most vigorous supporters of the America Invents Act. Enacted in 2011, that statute substantially expanded opportunities for third parties to contest the validity of patents, principally through the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It is likely not accidental that these same firms have been among the most active petitioners at the PTAB seeking to invalidate issued patents. Advocacy behavior/ I also collected evidence on firms’ advocacy activities by reviewing all patent-related amicus briefs filed in Supreme Court litigation over the period 2006–2016. This evidence shows that the business community generally does not favor robust patent protections: out of 740 firms that signed amicus briefs during the period, only 30% supported the patentee. Consistent with the proposed inverse relationship between firm size and reliance on patents, this figure falls to 21% if only Fortune 500 firms are included. Industry-specific evidence shows that business models — specifically, the level of integration — can approximately predict IP policy preferences. Financial services firms that monetize innovations through a bundled package of trading, advisory, and other services supported alleged infringers 81% of the time, whereas venture capital firms that fund idea-rich startups that seek to challenge incumbents supported patentees 100% of the time. Similarly, information technology companies, which often monetize innovations through integrated production and distribution infrastructures or platform-based business models, favored alleged infringers 75% of the time. By contrast, university technology transfer offices, which rely on contractual relationships with larger firms to capture returns on research outputs, favored patentees 96% of the time. Conclusions Today the U.S. patent system stands at a critical juncture. Since approximately 2006 (the year the Supreme Court issued eBay Inc. v. MercExchange LLC, which limited injunctive relief for patent infringement), virtually every branch of the federal government that can affect patent policy has taken steps to weaken patent protections (the exceptions being the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under the leadership of director Andrei Iancu and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division under the leadership of assistant attorney general Makan Delrahim, in both cases from 2017 to January 2021). There are strong reasons to believe this mostly weak-IP trajectory is inconsistent with the public interest in a robust innovation ecosystem. The historical experience of the U.S. patent system over more than a century suggests that weak-IP regimes favor incumbents that pursue bundled models for monetizing intangible assets while impeding entry by smaller R&D-specialist entities that are often best situated to displace, rather than merely improve upon, technological paradigms. That is unlikely to be a preferred outcome as a matter of both innovation and competition policy.

Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems.

The group says the campaign, called “Generate and Create” and unveiled on Thursday, will aim to highlight “how artists use generative AI to enhance their creative output” and “showcase how AI lowers barriers for producing art” as part of an initiative to “defend the longstanding legal principle of fair use under copyright law.”

The number of groups lobbying the U.S. federal government on artificial intelligence nearly tripled from 2022 to 2023, rocketing from 158 to 451 organizations, according to data from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks and publishes data on campaign finance and lobbying. Data on the total amount spent on lobbying by each organization and interviews with two congressional staffers, two nonprofit advocates familiar with AI lobbying efforts, and two named experts suggest that large technology companies have so far dominated efforts to influence potential AI legislation. And while these companies have publicly been supportive of AI regulation, in closed-door conversations with officials they tend to push for light-touch and voluntary rules, say Congressional staffers and advocates.

In November 2022, OpenAI released its wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Six months later, leading AI researchers and industry executives signed a statement warning that “the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Lawmakers around the world sat up and took notice. U.S. President Joe Biden signed a sweeping AI Executive Order; the E.U. modified its landmark AI law to ensure the models that power chatbots like ChatGPT are regulated; and the U.K. government convened the world’s first AI Safety Summit.

[(Freddy, freelance reporter and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, CalMatters, the Lost Coast Outpost, and other outlets across California.) “Big Tech Is Lobbying Hard to Keep Copyright Law Favorable to AI.”, Jacobin, 11-21-23, https://jacobin.com/2023/11/artificial-intelligence-big-tech-lobbying-copyright-infringement-regulation/]//LR

Big Tech leaders are spending millions of dollars — and pushing dubious national security concerns — to try to prevent federal regulators from forcing them to pay for the copyrighted works their companies are using to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems. At issue is a new effort by the US Copyright Office to consider how to apply US copyright law to the nascent AI industry. The matter has triggered impassioned pushback from powerful tech interests who say they must have access to people’s hard work for free, or the future of their industry will be jeopardized. The fight comes as artists, actors, news organizations, and others have sued AI companies using their work to train the emergent technology on how to create images in the style of certain artists, replicate voices of singers, write new literature based on copyrighted works, and many other instances in which original work is being harvested off the internet free of charge. As the AI industry is buffeted by executive shake-ups and mounting concerns that AI systems are growing too powerful, Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Big Tech venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have spent over $30 million lobbying lawmakers and regulators on AI and other tech-related issues. Andreessen Horowitz — which provided funding for Airbnb and Facebook, and helped finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter — has even claimed that if the Copyright Office were to enforce its existing laws protecting copyrighted works from exploitation, investment dollars could be lost and US national security could be threatened. “Over the last decade or more, there has been an enormous amount of investment — billions and billions of dollars — in the development of AI technologies, premised on an understanding that, under current copyright law, any copying necessary to extract statistical facts is permitted,” Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a comment to the Copyright Office. “A change in this regime will significantly disrupt settled expectations in this area,” the firm continued. “Those expectations have been a critical factor in the enormous investment of private capital into US-based AI companies which, in turn, has made the United States a global leader in AI. Undermining those expectations will jeopardize future investment, along with US economic competitiveness and national security.” The New York Times, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the News Media Alliance, Getty Images, and other organizations and trade groups representing artists, musicians, and journalists have complained that AI companies are violating copyright law by copying their material and using it to train AI. The use of AI was a core concern during this year’s historic writers’ and actors’ strikes. “Almost all of these AI companies are ingesting copyrighted works in order to train their AI, and in most instances they are not licensing, they’re not getting the permission, and they’re not compensating the copyright owners for using those works,” Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, told us. The Copyright Alliance, which represents over two million copyright holders and over fifteen thousand organizations, said in a comment to the Copyright Office that other than online piracy, “no copyright issue has drawn more interest from the Copyright Alliance membership than generative AI.” “Overzealous Enforcement of Copyright” The Copyright Office has roughly 440 employees tasked with examining hundreds of thousands of copyright registrations each year. Roughly five hundred thousand copyrights registrations are issued, which provide protections for original works, ideas, concepts, art, music, and other works. Last month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring the US Patent and Trade Office to work with the Copyright Office on recommendations governing AI, including how copyrighted material is used to train AI. The Copyright Office is currently conducting a study examining a potential mandate that would require AI developers to disclose training materials and compensation for copyright holders whose works were used to train AI. The Copyright Office began soliciting public comments on August 20 and has received over ten thousand comments from rightsholders, trade groups, AI developers, and venture capital firms. Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based firm that spent more than $800,000 in 2023 lobbying the White House, lawmakers, and federal agencies on AI, cryptocurrencies, and other matters, issued a comment with the Copyright Office on October 31. In the comment letter, the firm claims that AI can revolutionize the fields of medicine, education, technology, and warfare, but companies need free access to copyrighted material to do so. Especially for an AI technology called “Large Language Models,” which is “trained on something approaching the entire corpus of the written word,” Andreessen Horowitz wrote. The firm claimed that if the Copyright Office were to make AI developers pay to use copyrighted material, it would risk billions of dollars in investments and threaten national security. “The United States is currently at the vanguard of the AI industry as a direct result of these expectations and investments,” wrote Andreessen Horowitz. “There is a very real risk that the overzealous enforcement of copyright when it comes to AI training. . . could cost the United States the battle for global AI dominance.” Andreessen Horowitz and its Big Tech brethren believe that the fair use doctrine of copyright law allows them to hoover up information and use it to train AI. The fair use doctrine allows the use of copyrighted material for news, commentary and criticism, research, and when the use of the material produces a new concept or body of work that is different from the original version. Microsoft spent $6.8 million lobbying Congress and a slew of federal departments on AI, facial recognition technology, and other issues. Microsoft is a partial owner of OpenAI, which operates DALL-E and ChatGPT, two of the leading image- and text-based AI technologies currently in use. OpenAI, which recently registered to be its own lobbying firm, claims that its technology does not store exact copies of text and images and that ChatGPT doesn’t provide “verbatim repetition or ‘memorization’ of training data,” according to its comment filed with the Copyright Office. OpenAI said its AI technology is trained on information publicly available on the internet, information obtained through licensing agreements, and information “that our users or human trainers create and provide,” OpenAI wrote to the Copyright Office. OpenAI went on to say that given the vast amount of information on the internet, having to pay to use it would be impractical. “The diversity and scale of the information available on the internet is thus both necessary to training a ‘well-educated’ model (which, again, does not contain copyrighted expression) and also makes licensing every copyrightable work contained therein effectively impossible,” OpenAI wrote. OpenAI said fair use is central to its training process and that a “restrictive interpretation . . . could drive massive investments in AI research and supercomputing infrastructure overseas.” Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has spent $14.6 million this year lobbying Congress and the Biden administration on AI and other tech-related issues. In comments filed with the Copyright Office, Meta claimed that it is only extracting “unprotectable facts, ideas, and concepts” from copyrighted work, all of which are not protected by copyright law. But even if they were protected, Meta argued, the widespread extraction and use of those works would fall under the fair use doctrine. Meta compared using the extracted material to train AI to teaching a child how to speak. “Just as a child learns language . . . by hearing everyday speech, bedtime stories, songs on the radio, and so on, a model ‘learns’ language by being exposed — through training — to massive amounts of text from various sources,” Meta wrote. Google spent $9.2 million this year lobbying lawmakers on intellectual property enforcement and a slew of issues pertaining to AI and other tech-related matters. Google also believes the fair use doctrine protects AI from copyright infringement, according to a comment the company filed with the Copyright Office.

E-commerce companies including Amazon are rallying around bipartisan legislation aimed at cracking down on counterfeits sold online, marking a shift in negotiations after months of sparring between lawmakers and the tech industry over attempts to regulate the issue.

But the platforms are notably endorsing a more modest proposal while resisting efforts seen as more threatening that could open them up to greater legal liability or make complying with new rules more challenging.

Craigslist, eBay, Etsy, HobbyDB, Mercari, OfferUp, Poshmark, and Shopify are among the companies lobbying Congress about the SHOP SAFE Act, which stands for “Stopping Harmful Offers on Platforms by Screening Against Fakes in E-commerce.”

The Computer & Communications Industry Association was among the organizations opposing the bill in a letter to lawmakers sent on Tuesday. It said the bill would “benefit foreign luxury brands, but harm smaller U.S. companies and consumers.”

WASHINGTON — House lawmakers on Friday introduced sweeping antitrust legislation aimed at restraining the power of Big Tech and staving off corporate consolidation. If passed, the bills would be the most ambitious update to monopoly laws in decades.

The bills — five in total — take direct aim at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google and their grip on online commerce, information and entertainment. The proposals would make it easier to break up businesses that used their dominance in one area to get a stronghold in another, would create new hurdles for acquisitions of nascent rivals and would empower regulators with more funds to police companies.

Lower prices on everything from meat to medication to airfare could be coming if a political movement to free up economic markets continues pushing forward.

Unlike recent administrations from both parties, the Biden Administration has taken an aggressive approach on antitrust, which includes the regulation of anticompetitive business practices, challenging large corporate mergers and enforcing laws aimed at keeping economic markets competitive.