On: 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.