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The app that serves up hot takes on how to fix the world recently got one from its founding father. Twitter (now X) founder Jack Dorsey posted pithily: “delete all IP law,” to which the app’s stepfather, Elon Musk, replied with even greater brevity: “I agree.”

So, what do the two tech bigwigs have against laws restricting the commercial use of patented inventions and copyrighted works of creative expression? It’s probably got to do with how they impact the current talk of the town in tech: AI models trained on copyrighted works produced through hours of human chin-scratching.

Dorsey’s call to Ctrl A+Delete terabytes of laws regulating the monetization of human ingenuity garnered nearly 5,000 replies:

* Tech investor Chris Messina commented that “automated IP fines/3-strike rules for AI infringement may become the substitute for putting poor people in jail for cannabis possession.”

* Tech entrepreneur and attorney Nicole Shanahan disagreed, saying deletion wasn’t reasonable but that she’s open to discussing IP reform.

* Writer Lincoln Michel suggested that Dorsey and Musk’s anti-IP stance is hypocritical, claiming that “none of Jack or Elon’s companies would exist without IP law.”

Since it’s hard to boil this all down to 280 characters, let’s get into the complicated legal and business issues behind the social media squabble.

Musk and Dorsey are members of the Silicon Valley clique convinced that current IP regulations are as conducive to tech advances as human-operated toll booths are to speeding up traffic. Dorsey is a longtime champion of open-source software. In 2019, he founded the Twitter clone Bluesky as an open-source project, and his company Block recently released the AI agent-building application called Goose, which is free for anyone to use.

Before that, Musk once said that “patents are for the weak”:

* He famously declared a decade ago that Tesla wouldn’t sue anyone who uses its tech “in good faith,” though it did subsequently end up in a patent dispute with an Australian electronics company.

* The first version of Musk’s AI bot, Grok, was partially open-source, pitting it philosophically against the proprietary (aka not free to use for profit) OpenAI models.

Intellectual property law professor Dennis Crouch claims that Dorsey and Musk don’t like IP law because it impedes their business interest as tech moguls, since these laws are meant to preserve small enterprises against corporate behemoths.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest advocates for compensating creatives for their work that gets used to train AI are…creatives. Michel declared in his X response that Musk and Dorsey simply “hate artists.”

More than 30,000 creators recently signed a Statement on AI Training almost as succinct as Dorsey’s post. It said: “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.” Similar sentiments have been shared by visual and musical artists, as well as journalists, but the legal questions remain unsettled:

* The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that the company used its content illegally to train ChatGPT. However, several news organizations, like News Corp, Axel Springer (Morning Brew’s parent company), and Time magazine, have entered licensing agreements with AI companies.

* A group of publishers and authors, including Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz, are suing Meta, alleging that it used their copyrighted works to train its Llama AI models without compensating them. Meta claims that feeding its AI training algorithm the works of literature constituted “fair use.”

What is fair use?

It’s the legal term for when copyright-protected content can be used without the owner’s permission for a “transformative” purpose such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research—for example, a poem quoted in a news article, or an SNL parody of the latest Severance episode. Legal scholars say judges in the creators vs. AI companies cases will have to consider the complex technicalities of exactly how the AI was trained using proprietary content and whether it meets the definition of fair use.

Experts say that IP law needs to be updated to keep pace with technological advancements and the evolving distribution of content. The breakneck pace of AI development creates even more urgency for these updates(More details: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/is-the-law-playing-catch-up-with-ai).

Some warn that a global patchwork of laws could complicate AI development and have called for the establishment of international standards.

Legislators worldwide have been working to revise IP laws for the age of AI, aiming to strike a balance between innovation and fairly compensating creators. Some countries are considering a more pro-AI approach, like the UK, where the government is weighing a controversial rule that would let companies use copyrighted works without permission if IP owners don’t opt out.