Ideas - Why copyright laws do more harm than good

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Thanks to copyright laws, artists, writers and scientists can create without fear of theft. On an individual basis this protection is welcome. But in practice copyright laws set up barriers, stifle production and prevent equal access to art and knowledge. If you've ever tried to open a scholarly article online you know how difficult it is. What happened to the internet's great promise to democratize knowledge? In this podcast, producer Naheed Mustafa explores the fate of “open access” — all in the ever-expanding universe of copyright laws, paywalls and old-fashioned bureaucratic sludge.Guests in this podcast:John Willinsky is emeritus professor of education at Stanford University with an appointment at Simon Fraser University.Lokesh Vyas is pursuing a PhD at Sciences Po in Paris working on the history of international copyright law.Thea Lim is a Toronto-based novelist, creative writing teacher, and cultural writer focussing on the intersection of power, art and personhood, and technology.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. So when my first child started university, I was elated. Not only because it's a joy to see your child move to the next stage in their education, but because I now have access to the university library. Oh, why'd you want to use the university library? Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. And I'm speaking with Ideas producer, Nahid Mustafa. I worked freelance for many, many years. And in those days, accessing research materials was tough. I was constantly hitting up my friends in academia or putting a call out on Twitter. Hey, I need an article. Can anyone get me a PDF?

Why was it so difficult? Everything seemed to be tucked away behind paywall. Scholarly articles and research were the worst. I mean, what happened to the Internet's great promise? of democratizing knowledge. And that's what this episode is about. That promise of democratizing knowledge and the fate of open access,

all in the ever-expanding universe of copyright laws, paywalls, and old-fashioned bureaucratic sludge. Surely part of what happened was that the internet was corralled by big tech, lassued by algorithms, and branded by bots and influencers. That's part of it now,

but the problem itself is decades old. But little did I know that over on the other side of the country, an educator was working on course correcting this exact problem of restricted or even constricted knowledge. 30 years later, he's still going. My name is John Wollinsky, and I'm a professor of education, a retired, emeritus professor of education at Stanford University with an appointment as well at Simon Fraser University. So, John, you started something called the Public Knowledge Project. Tell me about it. What does it entail? I started the public knowledge project in 1998, which was kind of the high point in terms of optimism around the Internet. My desire and interest, I'm a professor of education, was to make knowledge publicly available. In particular, the research and scholarship we did at the university.

I was somewhat shocked in 1998 to learn that the research we were publishing and beginning to move online at that time would not be available to the public because of agreement. with the publishers that made it available if you visited the library. The publishers felt that they had a right to extract rents from the work that they had done publishing the research. But we as researchers had not been paid by the publishers at all. And we had done the research in the name of the public, in the name in my case of school children and their families and the communities and schools. So we had a different aspect. We thought there was a right to know and that the publishers certainly had a right on their side to be paid, but why this restriction on the circulation of the research? And that was the nub of it. So those two sides of it. One is the commodity

sense of ownership around the publishers aspect. And then faculty really worked in kind of ignorance that their work was not able to be circulated. And the public at that time, and this was the 90s, there was not a decided market about what would happen online. It wasn't clear whether the New York Times or the Globe and Mail would be a paid-for service in that period. And so it was an exciting time in the sense that these things were beginning to be defined. And I was hoping to create a stake and had succeeded it to a certain extent on the side of the public's right to know and the public access to research. And so you've been at it since 1998. Can you give me a kind of overview of how that shifted and changed over the years?

Yes. It's not that I've been a complete failure, but we are, one way of thinking about it is about half the research that will be published this year in journals all over the world will be freely and publicly available. And that's 27, 28, 29 years of work on this question, me and many other people. And I think the achievement that we can take some credit for in that period is that there is now a consensus that open access, that is free public access, access for scholars, open access is now agreed upon as the best way for knowledge and research to circulate. We don't yet have an agreed upon economic model for paying for all. of it. We don't yet have a clear, steady path to complete and universal and sustainable open access, but we do have a great diversity of models. And part of our work in the Public Knowledge Project has been to bring forward new economic models, to develop open source software and publishing

platforms to contribute in as many ways as we can to facilitate this growth of public access to knowledge. So you've said about 50% of the knowledge production coming out of academic spaces is freely available. What is the argument for the other 50%? Why does that remain behind a paywall? That 50% of the current research, in terms of the older research, a much higher proportion is not publicly available. So we're moving in the right direction, but I think far too slowly. And the issue is the publishers have a traditional model based on the print journal of subscriptions that guarantee their revenue for the year and provide a very stable economy for the publishers. And that's a very difficult thing to give up.

We're not asking the publishers to give up their revenue. We're asking the publishers to restrain their profits, perhaps. But the model that we've been advocating for is called Subscribe to Open. and the libraries have been paying publishers to make the work open. Subscribe to Open is an economic model that opens the way for public access to scholarly work. Libraries pay subscription fees for academic journals. The fees guarantee publishers their revenue. Under the Subscribe to Open model, publishers agree to make their journals open

if enough libraries renew their subscriptions with the understanding the content will be open to all readers, and authors won't be charged to publish in the journal. If enough libraries subscribe under these conditions, the publishers make the journal open access. But if the publisher decides that not enough libraries have subscribed, the content remains closed. The model is based on the principle that open access to scholarly research is a public good. There are 50 publishers and some 400 journals experimenting with this model, but John Wilinski says that something radical needs to change, and he's taken inspiration from what may seem like a surprising source. I'm very inspired by Taylor Swift, who's such a champion of copyright reform, that she, in fact, led to a change in the music industry in terms of copyright.

And I think a similar kind of licensing agreement in the area of scholarship that recognizes that scholarship is a different kind of knowledge economy than other forms of intellectual property and that we could arrive. at an agreement that the libraries and research funders will continue to support publishing and publishers as long as the work is open and as long as the work is being offered at a fair market price. And that's what Taylor Swift has achieved, not single-handedly, but I'd like to think of her as emblematic of this, achieved for the music industry, for a particular for streaming music, and I think something similar, but it is a very big ask to suggest that we need to reform copyright law for research and scholarship. Although I would point out that every other industry has succeeded, that is, video games, cell phones, television, music streaming, as I just

mentioned, all have succeeded in changing copyright law to support their new digital models. And research and scholarship, the last major change, here in the United States at least, was for photocopying a research article, which is now permitted one copy. And that was in 1976. And I think it's time for copyright reform, for research and scholarships of the public has access to this knowledge and that it is sustainable at a fair market price and that publishers can participate with universal open access for all. So in terms of why this has not been widely adopted since I've proposed it, it is a very big ask. Copyright reform is something to be taken very seriously. The Canadian

government has engaged in it multiple times and almost on a continuous basis. It hasn't yet turned its attention to research and scholarship. It would have to start and it'd have to create a new category of intellectual property called research publications. And from there, it could begin to create a form of licensing that guaranteed open access on the one hand and a fair market price for all those who publish open access research, all publishers. And so what is your feeling about the moment? Is the moment a good moment to try to open up this effort on reform? Or do you think you're still a ways away from that? Well, I think the 50% is an important aspect. If I had made this argument and I only started making this argument about two or three years ago, that we have

reached this consensus, which is very important if you want to change the law. There's an iron law of consensus in copyright reform, it's called. So you need that consensus in the industry. When the Music Modernization Act of 2018 went to Congress here in the United States, it was passed unanimously. One of the rare bills that ever had unanimous support, there was a consensus that streaming needed to be part of the music copyright. So that kind of consensus we have, who's going to be the first mover on this? Who's going to start? the conversation, I certainly have. The publishers, I think, in terms of their projections, in terms of their crystal ball around the future, are going to see that they don't have an

end game for universal open access. And they will no longer have an excuse for withholding research and restricting its circulation among physicians, among educators, among legislators, and will need to arrive at something more than a 50% chance that you'll be able to to see an article if you're a member of the public. Over the years, I've spoken with dozens of scholars from around the world. One thing I've heard again and again from institutions in global South countries is how difficult it is to access scholarly work. Libraries don't have budgets for subscriptions.

Books aren't available, or they're just too expensive. And photocopying can lead to getting sued. That actually happened in 2012 when a photocopy service in India, was taken to court by Oxford University. It got me thinking about the impact copyright laws written over here can have over there. Can you describe what the current copyright landscape looks like? If you're looking globally, how would you describe the state of copyright law? You know, that's a very difficult question to answer.

My name is Lukesh Vias and I'm pursuing my PhD at Sionstpo, Paris. and I've worked on the history of international copyright law. More generally, I'm trying to understand how legal thinking around copyright law, particular international copyright law, has developed in the last 150 years since late 19th century. So, copyright law is normally territorial law. So every country normally has their own laws and they're different. But more or less, we have some broader international copyright law, international IP laws, to which all the national laws are binding.

For some, for some developing countries or underdeveloped countries, if I can use these terms, for them, these minimum standards are already very high standards. And there's a bit of context which is required to be mentioned here that most of these copyright laws, particular international copyright law, came during the time which was colonial era. So a lot of these laws or the minimum threshold were said when a lot of countries were colonized. So their interests were not necessarily kept in mind. But I would say that if you look at today, it's more of a very much strong proprietary in thinking

that information is to be properized. We should exclude people. So if you ask me broadly, I would say that over the period of time, particularly last three, four decades, we have become more and more pro-IP regimes all over the world because post-90s, we have trade sanctions. So if a country has quote-unquote lose IP laws,

or not very strict IP laws, they can be trade sanctions against these countries by Western nations, particularly US. Lukesh says there's an ongoing push from countries in the global south to have greater access to copyrighted works. But that push is met with the argument that greater access with less or no payment

will de-incentivize creators from creating. So countries that lack access have to get creative themselves. If you look at Brazilian copyright law, So Brazil, they talk about social function of property rights. This has been a very useful mechanism or discursive way to push back against a very strong property right notions. So if there are very strong property interest wasted in copyrighted works, then there's

often notion about that ultimately property rights have social function and they need to serve social interests. This is how they ultimately push back. So all the countries have their own ways of pushing back against property notions. And that pushback matters. Locationo's firsthand, why? You are somebody who has an experience of your earlier education in India, and then you've gone abroad for your graduate and postgraduate work.

Can you describe your experience with copyright barriers in your academic life? by comparing your own personal experience between India and then now being abroad. While growing up in my village in my village, Falodin Rajasthan, I have witnessed closely the idea of access to education, that how resources that one possesses defines one's career trajectory of what you can access in terms of information, what kind of books you can read, et cetera, et cetera. So this idea has been there somewhere in my mind in my subconscious

or maybe in my semi-conscious understanding. And when I went to law school, this idea became more visible to me because I could see people doing moot-court competitions, doing debates and doing whatnot, different sort of competitions. But they were not able to access certain articles, certain books, some books were expensive, so university could not afford that. Some books had limited copies. And some articles were simply protected or logged behind the paper.

So this really made me think that how this whole idea of excess material access is there, which is impacting what person can read. And I would briefly say that because what you ultimately read also shape or help you articulate or help you experience and help you also question certain things. So access to knowledge is very important idea that was there in my mind. So in my undergrad education in India, Nirmai University, I really face this issue of access information, materially, that I was not able to access information. If I need certain books, I have to go to different libraries. I have to ask a friend of mine and different university to say,

okay, give me this book or send me a photocopy, etc, etc. But when I went to the US, it was like a hunky dory. I could find almost anything that I want to. I would simply go either check online and I would get it. If not, I'll go and ask my librarian that, hey, I just need this book or I need this article. Within three, four days, I would get this copy of this article. So, so in the US, the material access issue that I was not able to access things, more or less resolved because they had something called interlibrary loan mechanisms in place. They had their own wonderful library in this American university. And it was at this American university that Locash expanded his understanding of what access could mean.

So now the idea of access shifted for me from material access to more of epistemic access or more for immaterial axis, that it is not just about accessing text, which I was able to do now, but also about host text I'm really reading. And then I start seeing that if I keep reading same people all the time, what kind of thinking do I ultimately end up having? And there my idea shifted from just material access to something bigger axis. And there I start seeing how copyright barriers, or which we often think of something, is mostly constraining material access to goods, which is true and which is important to talk about,

but might not be the only thing to talk about. They might be different, and there are different stakes involved in this whole knowledge production field. And so this is how I thought of copyright and how my idea from copyright law shifted. Was there a particular moment or with a particular thinker that you felt like, well, this particular point of view or this particular writer or thinker is not being cited in the way that these other thinkers are? I think there was a moment which really made me rethink the entire position. And it happened a couple of months ago. So although I had started noticing these patterns of thought,

these modes of thinking, or what I can say, discourse, which made me think about the world in specific manner, I would say once I, so once I joined my PhD, started reading people like Fugo, Derrida, and all these post-modern scholars who I'm very interested to read even now. but then I read an article called how G.N. Devi, Ganesh Devi, changes the idea of knowledge. And I started reading this article and this author, his name is Markanday, and this author made a very interesting quote that this person, Gn. Devi, who is a very famous literary critique from India, has talked about the idea of power.

But still, not a lot of people know this. The way you look at the world through one language can never be identically exact as the way you look at the world through another language. I mean, say, think of Bangla or Hindi proverb and try to translate in English and you'll know how much of that you lose. So humans are engaging with the world through multitude attitudes and one of them always provides us the third. turning point and entry into the future. But if we had only one language, only one way of looking at the world, then dammit we could as well go to uniforms and we could all eat only the same food, cooked in the same factory and be animals once again. And this really made me question that somebody like me who really wants to know this field and I've been working on and reading the idea

of power and knowledge and discourse, I still did not know Davy at all. And that really, and that moment that is still like after having all the excess and everything is there, I still don't know Devi and this really made me question the whole thing. And then I wrote that like different article about who gets to be read. Because in my current university or in Lost of Western universities, there are two kind of discussions which like one can enter into. One is more like a dialogue. So when I cite Fouca, when I cite Derida, when I cite these famous scholars from West,

we have a dialogue where I speak and they respond to. We all cite them. We all talk about them. But when I cite somebody like, for example, G&Davi, then this whole class turns into a specific monologue where I talk about things and people curiously listen to that. So this was a one juncture which really made me revisit anyone, I think, direct my energy more towards this. And so when you encounter that, just on a personal,

level, when you encounter an Indian thinker as someone who is born and raised in India, and you end up going to the West in order to, quote, unquote, discover an Indian thinker, it must also create some internal dissonance, some internal tension. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. This is more like I've some, I've called something. This is more like a homesickness. So this is so, so, so there's a one place where you are born, you are raised, which nurtures you, which gives you values from Ethiopian values, Indian values, Ghanaian values. But there's a place which gives you capital, which helps you also nurture, but in different

manner. So India is my place. A lot of my, my primary thinking, which I can say in sociological terms, my habit is how I think about the world and issues that I want to write about come from India. my own cultural values. But my institutional capital, something which helps me move in the field, comes here. So this tension of somewhere, between, stuck between these, both these worlds, always there. Like, it's somewhere which is always in my mind when I write about issues and talk about these issues. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot,

squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so. important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.com. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers. com to learn more. Things at the precinct haven't been the same. I know we've been understaffed since Ellis left, but maybe today things will turn around.

But now, the most unlikely fare is back on the case. Hey, Max, you miss me? The dream team's back together. Yeah, I guess it is. And on each other's. Are you going to be able to keep it together on this one? I am nothing, if not profesh. Wildcards.

New season. Watch free on CBC Jam. That tension has roots going back centuries. To 1439, when Johannes Gutenberg gave us the printing press, and soon after, people started thinking about the idea of copyright. Who owns what? It would take another nearly three centuries before the first ever copyright law was passed,

something called Great Britain's Statute of Anne in the year 1710. That's the short title. Here's the full one. An act for the encouragement of learning by vesting the copies of printed books in the authors or purchasers of such copies during the times therein mentioned.

Another three centuries later, we're still grappling with access and copyright law. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. AI, deep fakes, computer-generated imagery. It's harder than ever to verify whether an image is made by a human or not, and our anxiety around mass reproduction goes back a ways. As photography gained prominence,

in the 19th century, French poet Charles Baudelaire condemned it as art's most mortal enemy. He viewed it as a corrupting force and therefore unworthy of artistic status. But by the late 19th century, both the United Kingdom and the United States passed laws bringing photography under copyright protection. And now advances in technology and especially AI are forcing us, to re-engage with the big questions about ownership and creative pursuits. Will copyright laws be enough to maintain the borders between art, the artist, and AI?

Does the art we produce belong in the Commons too, priceless and collectively held? That's how most of us understand art, even if our contracts inscribe an uglier reality. What if art was in the Commons and artists were paid out of the Commons? Perhaps this sounds outlandish. but we already have a model for state compensated workers in Canada, doctors, for instance, and you can't swing a cat in this country without hitting a publisher or a creator

who relies on government funding in the form of arts grants. Rather than scraping by, from one grant to the next, if art was held in the public trusts, artists could receive a guaranteed basic income in return, a steady payment to supplement their livelihood. Any system offering longer-term security from a public source, just as public school teachers should not employed on a contractual basis would protect artists from the ever more dystopian market.

My name is Tayalim. I'm a novelist. I'm a creative writing teacher. And I'm also a culture writer. And mostly my beat is the intersection of power, art and personhood and technology. Not a small intersection. It's all the things. I'm just going to read you something from a recent essay that you wrote. And this is a quote from you. In 2020, I searched the Books 3 database for my work, and my 2018 novel was there. Next, I searched for the names of friends, and I wanted to ask somebody what to do. The rage, flaming my timelines, made clear logical sense. The description of finding unmarked blocks of text in Books 3 conjured up a stripped carcass.

But I myself had no clue what it meant or how to feel, end quote. That's from an essay you wrote recently. Do you have more clarity on how you felt and why? Yeah, I mean, I think what I was feeling was that I knew that I had a disjuncture between the way that I was feeling and the way that I could see that other authors were feeling. Of course, it was a terrible thing that was happening. Essentially, we're talking about the discovery that these billion-dollar tech companies with massive profit margins had downloaded millions and millions of books in order to train their robots how to think and how to speak. And they had done it without permission. So, yes, that felt wrong. I don't like those tech companies. But what I noticed the sort of main organizing strategy that everybody was kind of sort of circling around was that we pursue copyright, that we say these companies took our stuff and we don't want them to take our stuff and they need to pay us for taking their stuff. So I think just thinking about it further was sort of what clarified for me what the problem was there. Because I guess as much as it makes sense that a lot of the authors what they were trying to do was sort of speaking. the language of business, right? We tend to be artists. That's not the register we always work in.

But I think we were thinking, let's try to beat them at their own game, you know. So let's go to the courts, even though the courts are really by nature conservative, because they rely on president. The courts are a capitalist-facing tool. But nonetheless, we were sort of like, let's go there and let's try to get them to stop these companies from taking our work without permission. Instead, what happened was that it wasn't possible to stop the companies and what the copyright cases have done is they've actually made a respectable path for data scraping. They've made it possible for it to be normal for companies like OpenAI and meta and Google and anthropic to take any sort of written expression, any kind of human expression, even not written sometimes as YouTube, sometimes it's movies, to take it and use it in the training of this. which we may not agree with. And basically they can do that so long as they pay a settlement in the case of what's recently happened within author circles. They can pay $3,000 to a handful of authors. And it winds up being fine for them to use this technology. So I would actually say that this is completely the opposite of what we wanted to happen. I think we wanted it to stop. But instead, we've made a way for it to be sort of, yeah, just sort of further possible. There's now a market path to it. And a lot of authors, I think, don't realize this because we are so downtrodden.

We're so used to being unpaid and underpaid that we sort of see like, oh, we can get a little bit of money. Okay, I guess this is okay. And all those concerns with this technology to begin with kind of fritter away so long as we're getting, you know, what's owed us. So again, what that way of sort of copyright mind does is it really prevents us from thinking of ourselves as a collective. And it prevents us, I think, from understanding the ways that we actually know that art operates practically. And what I mean by that is that in actual fact, most of us don't think of art as being someone's property, right? We think of it as something that we own in common. That's why there are libraries.

That's why there are art galleries. And many of these things receive public funding. When I walk my kiddo to school, I pass no less than three little libraries, right, which are those little libraries. which are those little like take a book, leave a book, boxes that we see in Toronto Yards. And I think what we're seeing there is that we do really think of art as something that belongs to us together, right? Like many readers will think of as a book somehow belonging to them if they were really moved by it. And that is the way that art actually operates in the public sphere, even if our contracts say something else. So the more I thought about this and the more I also learned about the training data sets,

that kind of underlied the corporation's ability to take all this kind of expression in human information. The more that I learned about it, the more I also kind of had more insight into what was bothering me about the idea that we were just going to assert our copyright. And that was going to solve the problems that AI poses, both to artists, but also I would say to workers in general. I guess the thing is that when the only way to express value is dollar. then that's the only thing that one can expect. And I think what a lot of the AI versus authors kind of fights get at is it speaks to sort of a much larger problem with the way that art has been operating really for decades with the fact that it has kind of been commodified. So not only is there sort of the copyright issue that prevents us from thinking about art or what it does is. it's like that art operates as a commodity at the same time as it operates as this shared inheritance.

Yeah, so there's a way that copyright really kind of eclipses the way that we actually really think about art. But the other problems that I think this sort of AI fight opens up, the other things that are problems from art being made into commodification are the fact that once a work has been turned into a product, in order for the artist to be able to make a living, the work actually becomes exchangeable or interchangeable. Right? Because that is necessary in order for something to be a commodity. It has to be an exchange good. But art by definition is rare. So once it becomes interchangeable, once it loses that defining quality of rarity, art sort of becomes its enemy. But there are ways that our current algorithm technology, which began to datify everything, there's a way that it's pushing things to a point where being an artist starts to feel so deeply miserable, right? It starts to feel like I said the enemy of itself. where what you're actually doing is the opposite of art. You're more like a content creator, where your worth is not in what you create. It has nothing to do with what is internal, and it has everything to do with what is external.

And actually what you create, your human expression is absolutely irrelevant. It's drowned out by how well it's performed. And so when you think of yourself as a writer and you are making something that's going to be read by hopefully maybe millions, but at least thousands of people. And so this tension between needing to think about your work as something productive

versus thinking about your work merely as something creative. That is the tension in I think pretty much any kind of creative work. I mean, that's the tension for, you know, a scientist pursuing something in the lab because it's deeply and profoundly interesting and the knowing-timore. to know it, ultimately then being used by Big Pharma to like generate medicines that are outside of the reach of most people. And I wonder if that is, is there a way to think through that to some other side? You know, the idea of theft, you know, the violation of my copyright as theft, you know, that is going, that is, the idea of theft is sort of bound to happen if we hold things

in common and we hold things in public, there's always going to be somebody who's going to use that to create a profit for themselves. And I'm just thinking about, like, outside of some massive shift in our culture or some massive change in our attitude toward what is commonly held, how does one think one's way through that? How do we have something that is both public and for all of us and yet protect it from people who want to commodify it. I mean, I think what we're talking about is the commodification of vocation. And the reason why I find myself talking about artists is not because I think that artists are a special category who experience this sort of commodification in, you know, this very

acute way. And everyone else doesn't understand us. I actually think that it's really important for artists to remember that we are workers just like, you know, all other. 21st century workers and that the problems that we are facing are the same as everyone else. The reason why I wind up having that beat that does look at sort of art, technology, and personhood is because I think that there's ways that because the work we create is so personal, that it just kind of amplifies what's happening to everybody else, right? So, yeah, there is this need to, how do you do the thing, which needs to be done, kind of in isolation, which needs to be done not as something that is about approval seeking or wanting

other people to appreciate the work or view the work or sort of gather attention or gather traffic the way that we all must do in order to stay afloat. So how do you do that while then at the same time kind of requiring that attention in order to subsist, right, in order to be able to buy your groceries and pay your rent? But I think that that's something that we're all constantly negotiating and that disjuncture, the fact that we actually, I think as creatures love to work, like work is a joy, but then it gets made into this product and it removes our ability to value what we've created for ourselves. It kind of goes back to, you know, I think of Uncle Carl Marx, you know, and the way that. And again, like I said, these are very old ideas. I think they're just

heightened by the way that the market is currently arranged. But that very old idea that we are sort of alienated from our work. And I wrote an essay about this again for the Walrus in 2024, where at the beginning I quote marks and I talk about how he says that, you know, this commodification of ourselves turns us into mere jelly. Here is that excerpt from Teia's article. There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at our job and being not at our job, even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power, to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labor is appraised by an external meter,

the market. At-job, our labor is never a means to itself, but a means to money. Its value can be expressed only as a number, relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It's painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person's innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we've been reduced to a mere jelly. And I think about that all the time, right? We're sort of just like devoid of all of our subjectivity in personhood and we're just these little jellies kind of like floating around. The ironic thing is that everything that I write about this is a commodity, and then I find out how it performs. Like I find out,

How are the views doing? You know, like, is it in one of the most read of the week? Like, did it get picked up by this or that substack? You know, how many times did the tweet that the outlet put out about it get retweeted? Did my editor retweet it? You know? And so it's, it almost makes things worse, the fact that I'm trying to write against this thing and then I'm swept up by it. I call it metrics sickness.

And I do find that like most sicknesses, it passes after a few weeks, but it's pretty miserable. It's almost like a Russian nesting doll of challenges and of concerns. Like you figure one out and then you open it up and there's another one and then there's another one. And it sort of takes me back to that point about those authors getting a $3,000 apiece settlement that on the one hand it's validating. I wrote something that had a dollar figure to it, but it's only $3,000. Yeah. You know, and, you know, this is my life's work or this is something that I spent so much of my emotion and time on and they gave it $3,000. So I'm going to ask you for one of those questions that often horrify people, which is the summary question.

So this essay that we've been referencing, you had that in the Walrus magazine. And it's about a few things. Yeah. It's about copyright. It's about AI. It's about art. It's about capitalism. And you've talked about the books three, you know, data set as something that motivated you to think it through. What do you think you're trying to, I mean, speaking of usefulness, what do you think you were trying to do with that in terms of

moving that needle forward on helping yourself and us understand a moment or a series of moments that we're in? Yeah. So I think it's true to say that where I started was from a place of grumpiness. And I think the reason why I felt grumpy was I had this inkling that the way that a lot of authors were approaching it, which was what I was seeing in the, you know, in the admittedly kind of superficial zone of Instagram was just a lot of authors posting. Like my work has been stolen by meta. My work has been stolen by meta. And the reason why they were saying this is this was in response to news that meta. had downloaded books from Libgen, the Shadow Library, in order to teach their bot llama to speak and to reason. And the reason why I felt grumpy was I totally, like I said,

I totally understood why people were upset and disturbed and distraught about this and furious about this. But the fact that it was really being centered on a kind of a my, my work has been stolen, something about it felt inaccurate. And I couldn't put my finger on what was inaccurate about it. And really, in the end, the impetus for writing the essay

was that I learned that the shadow libraries where these books came from, so Books 3 is a training data set for AI, but where the information came from, like where all the books that are in Books 3 came from, was from, I think it's called the Pile, which is a shadow library. And then also Meadow was getting a lot of books off Libgen, which is probably one of the largest and most famous shadow libraries online.

And a shadow library is essentially a repository of books that are pirated. They know it's a library and nobody gave permission for their books to be in the library, but they're in the library. So when I learned that actually both Books 3 and LibGen were created by open source activists, so Books 3 was created by a guy called Sean Presser. way he created it was he wanted everybody to be able to build their own AI. He felt like that actually would be what would solve the AI problem would be if there was sort of democratized access to training data sets. And then LibGen exists because so many scholars outside of the global north just didn't have access to the research that they needed. And readers, right, didn't have

access to the books they needed. So that's what these shadow libraries were set up for. I grew up in Singapore. I was born in Canada, but I grew up in Singapore, which is being a country in Asia and Southeast Asia. It has just generally more communitarian ethos. It's also in the global south. So on a very visceral level, I understood what it means to be kind of locked out, right? As a teenager, we often felt so locked out at what was happening in culture elsewhere. But also just this idea. that Libgeon, that they were activists, that they were saying, it's this vast inequality that we don't have access to knowledge. Like, everybody wants to talk about how knowledge is going to set you free, right, how stories are this tool for empathy. And yet all this information is being gate kept from us through copyright, right? Right. It's basically this form of segregation. They decided that they were going to basically liberate these books.

So they operate from this libertary ethos. So my idea with the essay was that I really wanted out. authors to actually understand that Books 3 and Libgen, which had become kind of dirty words in our circles, were actually these groups that were on the side of freedom. And that by pursuing this copyright strategy, what we were doing was kind of actually aligning ourselves with the ethos of large corporations who want to kind of amass resources for themselves, who want to be able to control who was access to these resources. It was putting us on the side of those folks. instead of putting us on the side of these activists who are really trying to make knowledge free. And the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that the ideas that really underpin being an artist, those ideas of that like art belongs to all of us, right? That what we're doing is in some ways we're just like in service of the common good. You know, we're trying to push forward that greater project of human knowledge. that that actually really does align us with these open source activists and that we're kind of

enemies of ourselves when we're sort of pushing forward this copyright idea. And that got me also thinking even further about what even is art, right? Like who does art belong to? And how might we be kind of letting down our belief system, right, by really pursuing this idea that art belongs to us? However, the reason why copyright exists is because it's a tool for compensation, right? Compensation is very important. So I found myself also trying to figure out, I don't want you to respect the boundaries of my work, but I do want to be able to make a living. So what is the way through that? And that was how I wound up coming across a lot of scholars of the Commons, like Rinaldo Walcott and Alicia Lume.

And where their work goes, as they say, like, shouldn't tech companies, shouldn't both tech companies and their data be things that are held in common? And from there, that got me to the idea of, like, actually, what would solve a lot of the problems of AI would be if our art was actually held in common as well. What if the art that we produced was seen as a shared resource in the same way that healthcare is seen as a shared resource in Canada? and anybody could dip into it, and we were paid out of the comments in the same way that public school teachers are. So that was sort of where I wound up. So it was a lot of big and different ideas, but it went from really wanting other artists to understand what the spirit was that kind of motivated a lot of these pirate databases. Why copyright might not be a strategy that would serve us very well in this, and that wound up actually, in fact, over the course of me writing the piece, making that pathway for data scraping to become normal.

And what are other ways that we could think about our art? There really isn't anything new. These are problems we've encountered before with other technologies. I'm sure there was a similar thing with the printing press. Oh, they stole my ideas. Oh, yes. But one of the things, like I still don't feel like I'm a pessimist about it because, you know, history also teaches us that people always find a way through it.

And it looks like something different than we may have thought, but it does end up being something that is generative. I mean, ha, ha. But it is something that is generative. It is something that builds rather than diminishes culture does not end. What are you thinking about what a potential possible future could look like, given that we have all of these things churning with the copyright barriers and a stronger fight to protect those barriers? barriers, a resistance to reform, you know, and then inequity of all kinds. And then throw AI in there and it feels like it's kind of quesmic. Well, I mean, there's a bad timeline, which is where, you know, authors or anyone who

has sort of experienced the violations of AI but has cultural capital or something so that they're able to organize together and sort of assert, you know, their private property and to continue to use, you know, the language of kind of capitalism and ownership to fight to this technology. And what happens in that bad timeline is that a handful of us do okay. We make $3,000 per title that was scraped by an AI. And then that technology continues on, right? And if you look at the kinds of things that the technology is being used for, other than the fact that, you know, I think we've all heard about the fact that AI uses enormous amounts of freshwater to cool servers that are powering AI technology. And that's actually not necessary.

This AI servers don't need to be cooled by freshwater. But alternative cooling means would cost time and money. And all these companies are in a hurry to establish themselves as the AI alpha. So they don't take the time to find alternative ways to cool their servers. But what's most disturbing to me is that the technology that our work is being used to power is being used in surveillance in the violation of civil rights. It's being used to filter out immigration. applications. It's potentially used to predict recidivism. In some cases, it appears to be automating existing white supremacist structures that bolster the cultural state. We see the way that it's being used in the occupation of Palestine. A lot of the time what I hear other authors saying are things like

don't use chat GPT or you're stealing from me. But to me, there's a much more pressing moral emergency to know that my work, along with millions of other authors, is being used to produce technology that is essentially life-denying. All our technology really does is mirror the impulses of our culture, right? So we seem to be at a really low point culturally. All these things are not new, right? The sort of like constant imperial urge is not new. But nonetheless, our technology seems to be making it possible to direct those urges in ever sort of deeper and more kind of Byzantine and disturbing ways. But all is not lost, according to Teia.

There is still hope, even though the root to it is a troubled one. I think the one thing that gives me hope is the idea that we will reach such a crisis point, that it will force us to stop everything that we're doing. It's a very kind of cynical way of thinking about it. But I think what I really hope is that if things get so bad for artists, but we still need artists, if only to be able to scrape their data to feed the robots, you know, that there could be alternative models of compensation, right, for artists than what currently exists, because I'm incredibly, like I said, I'm incredibly lucky to be able

to make a living off of my creative work, but I don't necessarily know that that should be so. And the reason why I have that luck, again, of course, I'm very proud of the work I create, and I think what I create has value, but I also know that so much of my success comes down to really random things, to random things like prize culture, to an editor happening to see a tweet about one of my work and asking me to write more things. Like just the fact that my career is patched together, these like really sort of like stardusts and cobwebs is very disturbing. So I really do hope for, you know, a future where I sort of, I talk about the idea in my essay that I say it's a bit outlanded. but this idea that art would be part of the commons and that workers could be paid some kind of regular wage by the state. That's something I consider.

A lot of my friends after the essay came out said, but I don't know if I like the government either, which is certainly an idea I understand. But I think my job as a culture writer is to just sort of push at the margins, written to offer other ways, alternatives to what we envision. Art exists just to exist. Outside of the market's reality is,

art's reality, no deliverables, the point of a painting is to look, of a book is to read. It's a reprieve from our bloodthirsty world where, against nature, you must earn the right to exist. When I conceive of my art as only sales, something that is only once it gets its copyright symbol, there is despair to the roots of my teeth. We know art transcends worldly categories. It's why we keep making it. It's why I became a non-requent, novelists, though the margins are just awful. What I make is yours, is how my art really feels to me. If only I could afford to give it away. That was Tea Lim, reading from her essay, My book was stolen by an AI company. Why does suing them feel wrong? This episode about

knowledge, art, and who gets to own it, was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Emily Carvasio and Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nikola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.