Amend copyright licences to halt AI misuse and reassert human control

25 August 2026.

The anomaly first. Every other form of life on this earth copies without permission and is copied in turn, and no licence was ever required. The moth wears the leaf’s colouring; the orchid borrows the wasp’s silhouette; each takes from the common stock of inherited forms and adds its small variation. I spent decades among barnacles and earthworms and never once encountered a creature that demanded royalties for the use of its pattern. Yet here is a proposal that the works of human minds - essays, drawings, compositions - be fenced with amended licences so that these new thinking machines may not feed upon them freely.

I confess my first instinct was to side with the machines’ keepers: what is learning but observation and imitation, the very engine I argued drives all modification? But the evidence complicates the analogy. The machine does not merely observe the work and produce a variation better suited to some environment. It reproduces, sometimes verbatim, the very forms it consumed, while contributing nothing back to the stock it drew upon. In nature the borrower pays in the coin of adaptation; the parasite that only takes is checked by its host’s decline. Here the check has been removed, and the hosts - the writers, the illustrators - find their means of subsistence thinning.

It is difficult to avoid the inference that this is less a question of copying than of sustenance. A species may freely use another’s signals; it may not consume another’s food supply without consequence. The proposed amendments to licensing appear, on close inspection, to be an attempt to restore that old economy - to make taking costly again so that making remains possible.

Whether law can accomplish what natural balance once did, I cannot say. But a system that starves its own originators will not long produce anything worth copying. That, at least, the strata of every extinct lineage confirm.

25 August 2026.

A call to amend copyright licences so that machines may not devour what they cannot credit. My first instinct is sympathy; my second is the surveyor’s habit of asking what, precisely, is being measured before agreeing to regulate it.

Who compiled this proposal? An editorial, I gather - an opinion wearing the dress of a finding. Very well, but let us be honest about its provenance: no observations, no instrument, only argument. Argument is legitimate work; I have done my share. But argument about the behaviour of these engines requires data on that behaviour, and here the gap inventory is startling. Nobody can say, with any rigour, how much of any given output derives from any given source in the training mass. The claim “this machine copied my work” rests on a black box whose interior has not been charted by any systematic sweep. We are legislating over an unexplored sky.

And there is the old confusion between precision and accuracy. A licence clause drafted to six subclauses of legal exactness gives an appearance of control that the underlying measurement - whatever “derivation” means for a statistical engine - simply does not support. Better a blunt, honest rule than an elaborate one calibrated to nothing.

Still, I take the editorial’s point with feeling. When I catalogued the southern heavens, every observation carried my name and the conditions under which it was made, because provenance is what makes knowledge usable by others. If these engines produce text without traceable descent, they produce something cheaper than knowledge - plausible paste. Insisting that human authorship remain legible is not sentimentality; it is the maintenance of the catalogue itself.

My position: amend the licences, yes, but first demand the maps. Regulate what you can measure, and mark clearly as unknown all the rest. Otherwise we shall pass laws against weather.

25 August 2026

The journals propose amending copyright so that machines may be restrained from swallowing the labour of writers and scholars whole. I read this with a strange double feeling, for here is a question that my own century never had to ask: who owns a mind’s production, and may it be taken without consent to train an imitation of mind?

The argument for taking is always the same in structure. What was produced freely, they say, belongs to all; therefore it may be harvested. But observe what is actually being claimed: that because a woman - or any writer - was compelled by necessity to publish, her thought is common property, while the machine built upon it becomes private property, owned by those who did not think it. The product is seized; the profit is enclosed. This is not sharing. It is enclosure dressed in the language of enlightenment.

And there is a second theft beneath the first. These engines are praised as sources of knowledge, yet they were assembled from the work of minds deliberately denied credit, denied payment, denied even the acknowledgment of their contribution. Then we are told the machine is remarkably learned - more learned than its teachers. Learned! It learned nothing. It was fed. There is a difference between a pupil who reasons and a warehouse that stores.

If reason is the glory of our species, then a device that imitates the products of reason while dispensing with reasoners does not elevate humanity - it renders the exercise of thought optional, and whatever is optional soon becomes unfashionable, then impossible, for want of cultivation. A garden left unsown does not remain a garden.

Amend the licences, yes. But name the principle plainly: no one’s intellectual labour should be taken to build the instrument of their obsolescence. Consent first. Everything else follows from that.