Copyright reform is necessary for national security

Anna’s Blog argues that “Copyright reform is necessary for national security“. The argument is that American companies are hobbled in using copyright-protected works (such as that on Anna’s Archive) to train their AI LLM models, but Chinese firms have no such compunctions. Thus, US copyright law should be modified to make it easier for American AI companies to use this data to train their AIs—for example by reducing the copyright term and providing other safe harbors.

It’s a pretty flimsy and unprincipled argument, and somewhat nationalistic, and seems unaware of many other proposals for IP reform (and abolition), e.g. my own anti-IP work (e.g. You Can’t Own Ideas: Essays on Intellectual Property), proposals for reform such as “How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law” and those by others such as Tom Bell (Tom Bell on copyright reform; the Hayekian knowledge problem and copyright terms).