## Colophon tags:: [[&article]] [[copyright]] [[generative ai copyright]] [[%ai]] [[%tie]] [[i2]] [[%t]] url:: https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/a-for-effort-how-ai-upends-copyright date:: [[2026-06-05]] %% title:: A for Effort: How AI Upends Copyright Law type:: [[clipped-note]] file:: published:: 2026-06-05T00:00:00+00:00 [Click to Archive](https://web.archive.org/save/https://srajagopalan.substack.com/p/a-for-effort-how-ai-upends-copyright) %% archive:: ## Notes short:: > Copyright became necessary only when replication got cheap, when the printing press and the engraving could throw off a Raphael composition for the cost of paper and ink, no workshop of artists, no loom, no weavers. It is with these changes in technology that the first original effort needed protecting, because that is the moment it could be taken for nothing. > > ==AI is another technological disruption, but instead of making copying cheaper, it makes the first expression cheaper.== > #### Protecting Expression in the AI era > > AI takes that rule and turns it inside out, because the thing a Large Language Model produces for almost nothing is complete poems, stories, art, music. The cost of expression, even the first time, is very cheap. And this has not yet taken center stage. All the attention on AI and copyright law cases is framed around how these models were trained on expressions written by the effort of thousands of humans, often without permission or paying royalties > The existing lawsuits over training data raise a separate question about inputs. The concern I have in the longer term is with the outputs. What happens when a machine can produce a new paragraph, image, or song at almost no marginal cost? If we take copyright law and apply it to the outputs of LLMs as we do with humans, then unless the LLM spits out almost the same words in the same order, it is not a copy. Even if the words are about the internal conflict of a young prince in iambic pentameter. > But what has now become costly and valuable is the idea that is worth expressing. Large Language Models can express for cheap, making the idea, taste, and judgment relatively more valuable. AI will soon be able to generate ideas, without human prompting. And some of these ideas will be great, and may help with scientific breakthroughs. But a lot of these ideas will also be bad. What is worth writing, animating, or singing needs to come from somewhere else > Meanwhile, this is an enormous disruption, because if the value of writing is moving from the expression to the idea, then it is something copyright law is not designed to protect. For centuries copyright was built to protect the expression and to leave the idea alone. > So the law is stuck protecting the part that may no longer need protection in the world of AI given the cost. It guards expression just as expression is becoming cheap, and it cannot guard ideas, taste, or judgment without choking the innovation the system exists to feed > The thing that has become valuable is what the law was built to leave free, and there is no version of copyright that can protect ideas, taste, and judgment without doing damage to free speech and innovation > The price his designs commanded were the return on years of copying and drawing and workshop discipline that taught him which arrangement would hold and which would collapse. The training of the eye, the hand, the judgment, and his taste took years. > > That is the problem AI leaves on the table, and copyright was never built to solve it. The taste to know which idea is worth having, the judgment to tell a real one from a plausible one, the years that turn a trained hand into a reliable one, all of it still costs a lot, perhaps less than what it cost Raphael, because of better tools and technology. Even as the expression it produces falls to the price of a few seconds of computing, human capital building takes time. > The expensive thing did not vanish when expression got cheap. We will need to figure out how to incentivize effort. How do we motivate people to spend years training their eye and mind? How to pay people for the years that build judgment, so that they still spend them, when the writing those years produce can now be made for almost nothing, is the question AI has actually posed. > ==The old bargain paid for the first copy when the second was cheap. The new one must pay for the years that teach a person what is worth making, now that making itself gets cheaper.== ## Full Text ![[A for Effort: How AI Upends Copyright Law - 20260605 - fulltext]]