On: Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times

Well, the government has stepped into this fight between the newspaper fellas and the thinking machines, and it come down on the side of the machines. Seems the machines have been helping themselves to fifty years of other people’s writing without so much as a thank-you note, and Washington’s official position is that this is just fine.

Now I don’t know much about the law, but I know a little about ranching. If I drove my herd onto a neighbor’s range and let ’em eat his hay, I’d find out real quick what he thought about “fair use.” He’d be at my fence before the second cow finished chewing. And if I told him the hay was going to make smarter cattle, so really everybody wins - why, he’d still want his hay paid for, only now at a higher price on account of the speech.

The funny part is who’s doing the arguing. The same crowd that hollers loudest about property rights and protecting what a man earns looked at a newspaper’s property and said, well, that’s different, that’s just words laying around. A man’s cattle is sacred, but a man’s sentences, them’s free-range.

And the newspapers ain’t exactly innocent lambs in the pasture either. Half of ’em spent twenty years giving their stories away online to beat the other fella, and now they’re shocked somebody took ’em up on it. You leave your gate open long enough, don’t act surprised when the whole county grazes there.

I reckon the lawyers will be the only ones who get fat off this one, same as always. Both sides will plead poverty while the meter runs, and the judge will retire early on the proceedings.

Me, I just figure if a thing is worth taking, it’s worth paying for. But then, I’m just a dumb cowpoke, and what do I know about the new economics.

Not much, evidently. Same as everybody in Washington.