The United States has a history of protecting intellectual property rights. Copyright infringement and fair use of material laws have been enforced by American courts beginning as early as 1790. In 1998, copyright terms extended to 70 years after an author’s death and 95 years for corporate-owned content. Patents are protected for 20 years, and trademark rights since 1946 don’t expire unless abandoned through non-use.
Since joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, China has respected its national intellectual property rights including patents, trademarks, and copyrights within the country and with other nations or groups of nations with which it has signed international agreements. Several cases in China have ruled in favour of foreign company plaintiffs related to intellectual property theft and copyright violations, and abroad, as well Chinese companies have had to pay damages for intellectual and copyright infringements.
One would think that U.S. developers in competition to develop regenerative general-purpose AI, would be seeking protection for their intellectual property and respect that of others, but that appears not to be the case.
AI developers have appealed to Donald Trump and his “America First” agenda with recommendations for an action plan that ignores intellectual property and copyright law based on the argument that the future security of the United States outweighs violations of the ownership of materials being used to train AIs.
Generative AI models need exposure to lots of content to work. While owners of intellectual property used for training are not opposed to AIs using their content as reading material, they are opposed to it being used without paying for it. Some content used by companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Meta is licensed and paid for. But a significant amount is not and that is leading to lawsuits. News organizations, the film and music industries, and book publishers are seeking court rulings to ensure their intellectual, copyright, and trademark rights are protected.
The American-based AI developers, however, are arguing in court that if they are not given unfettered access to massive amounts of data under fair usage rulings, Chinese AI companies, who supposedly don’t respect intellectual property law will gain an unfair advantage in this new technology race to develop artificial general intelligence.
In the simplistic world of the Trump presidency, American AI companies believe they have found a champion in the competition with China, knowing the president’s “America First” agenda. Trump’s Deputy Director in the Office of Science and Technology Policy has stated, “The Trump Administration is committed to ensuring the United States is the undeniable leader in AI technology.” Does that mean AI companies can run roughshod over intellectual property rights?
Elon Musk, the President’s streamline-government-go-to guy, is also the CEO of xAI, another generative AI American company whose Grok AI is in the race with OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon-back Anthropic with the battle for intellectual property protections on the line.
This February, the U.S. courts rejected a “fair use” defence in a case where AI training used copyrighted legal materials without seeking permission. Will future court rulings extend similar protections to other content such as books, music, artwork and trademarks? It appears that American courts will treat the AI training issue case by case.
What is happening in the U.S. is likely to impact other countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union and China.
The American AI companies appealing to Trump state that Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek are a threat to their supremacy and justify their fair use access to copyrighted content as necessary to win the AI race to the top. Chinese copyright law, however, suggests a growing level of compliance with international copyright law.
It, therefore, is hard to understand American AI companies asking the Trump White House to overturn intellectual property protections enforced by acts of Congress dating back to 1790 and 1998. Content developers need fair compensation if their intellectual property is being used by generative AI.
]]>Trump went on to blatantly lie about the climate change agreement signed in Paris in 2015. He stated that the treaty gave “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we reproduce, controlling what we are using and what we are doing on our own land and in our country.” That’s an amazing bit of fabrication considering the treaty is non-binding for all signatories and represents more a set of guidelines subject to future international meetings and review. No country has its “feet held to the fire” as Trump has proclaimed. For more fact checking of Trump’s speech I refer you to analysis that appears on Bill Moyers & Company website.
It didn’t take long for the world to react. Our Canadian government spokesperson stated “we wouldn’t comment on a hypothetical like that.” A German government official, however, was far more forthright describing it as “a disaster.” The Energy Secretary for the United States government called the policy foolish. MIT Technology Review published a piece written by Richard Martin entitled “Donald Trump’s ‘America-First Energy Plan’ Shows He Knows Virtually Nothing About the Issue.”
Trump’s call to “rescind all these job-destroying President Obama executive actions” in a belief that he will restore “millions of jobs and trillions of dollars” of wealth to the U.S. is described as not passing even cursory inspection.
Trump’s call to drill for more gas, and dig up more coal was accompanied by a pledge to deal with real environmental issues like clean water and clean air and noe of the phony stuff. He proclaimed the U.S. had 150% more oil and energy reserves than all OPEC countries combined (statistics drawn from thin air. A quick fact check shows Saudi Arabia alone has 6 times the oil reserves of the United States. And Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar have 10 times the natural gas reserves of the United States. The only place where the United States can still outproduce these nations is in coal.) He proclaimed a mountain of wealth was tied up in American fossil fuel reserves worth $50 trillion. In his “America First” mantra he stated that the country would eliminate foreign imported oil (25% is imported today.) But in the same breath he proclaimed approval of KeystoneXL, the TransCanada pipeline to bring oil sands bitumen from Alberta to U.S. refiners. Obviously Alberta is an American state and Canada is not a foreign country.
Needless to say the scientific community expressed incredulity.
The Director of the American Meteorological Society Paul Higgins described Trump’s speech as yielding “larger changes in climate and faster rates of change,” posing a “greater risk to society.”
A senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth, described the remarks as showing “incredible ignorance with regard to the science and global affairs.” He pointed to Trump’s “pandering statements to the coal people” as a policy that would lead to disaster.
Rutgers University’s Jennifer Francis, Research Professor, Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, described the Republican presumptive nominee’s intentions as policy that “would not only diminish the quality of life for our children and their children, but…would…be a sorry message to the rest of the world that U.S. leadership does not base its decisions on facts or science but rather on greed and selfishness.”
Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University summed up the proposals as “an existential threat to this planet.”
And Katharine Hayhoe, Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University, stated that Trump’s policy would mean the U.S. would add 0.66 Celsius (1.18 Fahrenheit) to mean global temperatures over and above the 2.0 Celsius target agreed to in Paris as a limit which the world cannot afford to exceed. She argues that “if the U.S. does nothing on climate, the chances of every other nation succeeding in its targets are small.”
The Trumpian declaration of war on “phony stuff” came out in the same week that a new study described what could happen if we continue to burn fossil fuels at present rates. Entitled “The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon,” is based on a scenario where all known fossil fuel reserves get burned between now and the year 2300. Using a series of complex climate models, researchers led by Katarzyna Tokarska, University of Victoria, British Columbia, predict a mean global temperature rise of 8 Celsius (14.4 Fahrenheit). Variability in temperature rise means increases in the Arctic as high as 17 Celsius (30.6 Fahrenheit). The models models also forecast enormous impacts on rainfall patterns with a significant decline in Central America, the Amazon Basin, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, Australia, and Southern Africa. The paper concludes, “the unregulated exploitation of fossil fuel resources could result in significant, more profound climate change,” than any policymakers could have predicted when convened in Paris last fall. But don’t tell that to Trump. It’s all “phony stuff” invented by the Chinese.
