00:00We're back with Forbes and Imagination Action here in the World Economic Forum, Davos.
00:06We have Jason Peterson, CEO of GoDigital, talking about something that's super important
00:11and we've been talking about it all day, which is how in a world where gender of AI is basically
00:17becoming an infinite producer of content, how we protect copyrights, because basically,
00:22and Will.i.am was on stage this morning, and that was a huge topic.
00:27You didn't seem to have any answers other than, basically, Will pointed out that every
00:32song all of a sudden is derived from something else.
00:36How do you have a treaty, do you have a white paper out, that offers, thank goodness, some
00:40solutions to this versus just pointing out the problems?
00:43Maybe we can go over some of those, but first, tell us more about GoDigital and then we can
00:47talk about your solutions to the issue.
00:49Sure.
00:50I'll give you a little bit of my background.
00:51I started my career as a producer.
00:54I'm an attorney by training.
00:55I've made a career out of being the business end of things to creative people.
00:58We founded GoDigital in 2005 when we forecasted this paradigm shift from physical goods to
01:05digital goods.
01:06We were the first to monetize YouTube.
01:08We were the first to build digital supply chain for media in the cloud.
01:12We've been innovating in the financial markets for music for many years.
01:15The current innovations that are needed are really financial and licensing and legal related
01:19to that.
01:20You're seeing what these catalogs are selling for.
01:23People have figured out that copyrights are gold, but they're only gold if there's a fence
01:29around them.
01:30As an attorney, as an entrepreneur, and as somebody who works with creatives, how do
01:34we go into this new era where some of the protections that you've built over the last
01:3910 years are in the pre-AI era?
01:43We like to take a stakeholder capitalism perspective on these things.
01:46We think that win-wins-
01:48We're in the right spot then here in Davos for that.
01:50Completely.
01:51Win-wins can be built for the entire ecosystem of AI companies, of creators, of end users.
01:57What it really comes down to is creating certainty.
02:00If you go look at the landscape of what's going on right now, there's tons of lawsuits.
02:04There's tons of ambiguity in the law and how people should be working together.
02:08We think there's an ecosystem approach.
02:10I'd like to propose a framework for that that I think is quite simple and very actionable
02:14that the industries could implement.
02:17Let's walk us through that.
02:19What it really comes down to are six things.
02:21First, we should think about AI in terms of inputs, that's training data, transforms,
02:26that's prompts, and the outputs of the generative AI.
02:29We should think about that in the context of control.
02:32We should think about it in the context of credit and in the context of compensation.
02:35The three Cs, control, credit, and compensation.
02:39We should probably attack those one at a time.
02:41Starting with control, I think it's really important to begin with that courts continue
02:47to affirm the value of intellectual property.
02:50The copyright is, in fact, a fundamental right.
02:54Secondly, I think it's really important that legislators, wherever the market's inefficient,
02:58pass laws that create clarity.
03:00Thirdly, I think the industry and regulators need to work together.
03:04Where that really comes in are things like in search, for example.
03:07We've had a thing called a robot.txt file for 30 years.
03:10We've all seen it, not knowing what it meant.
03:14It basically tells search engines how to crawl a website.
03:18We should do something called an AI.txt file, that when AI companies are scraping data,
03:21it tells them what they can and can't use, what the licensing terms are, who they need
03:24to contact, all of the relevant details.
03:26We should create a public database of provenance information, who owns what, as it goes through
03:31the supply chain from the human authorship, through training, through people creating
03:35new content using generative AI.
03:37One question, that sounds like a global need.
03:41It doesn't even sound like even if the US did it, would that be enough?
03:44That sounds like something we would need to enforce around the world.
03:47Ideally, we create standards as an industry that are adopted locally in every country.
03:53If you look at copyright, there are conventions that are 100, 150 countries are members of,
03:58so it's very doable.
03:59I think the third piece is an industry collaboration with regard to control and credit.
04:04We should build APIs between generative AI companies, platforms, and copyright offices,
04:10so the copyright office can evaluate when something qualifies for copyright and who
04:14those owners should be.
04:15Right, right, right.
04:16There's a lot of shoulds.
04:17How do we get from should to do?
04:20I think it has to do with collaboration between industry and regulators.
04:25I think in the third piece, which is compensation, probably the most interesting piece, there
04:29are very, very good precedents that we can rely on.
04:32In the music publishing industry, for 100 years, they've had a value-sharing arrangement
04:39where when a broadcaster, a radio station, a television station wants to use music, they
04:43pay a share of their revenue into a pool, and it's shared among creators.
04:46If you think about tech, they've also had a value-sharing arrangement.
04:50It's called stock options, right?
04:52They share value among the people that are creating that value.
04:54I think, from a compensation standpoint, that these two industries, copyright owners and
04:59tech industries, should get together in a value-sharing arrangement, probably under
05:03a statutory licensing scheme.
05:05I think that the regulators in each country need to say, hey, there's a million creators,
05:10there's a handful of licensing AI, general AI companies that need to license this content.
05:15Creators, they don't have the capacity to negotiate with AI companies, and AI companies
05:18don't have the capacity to manage a million people.
05:20It has to be done wholesale, it can't be done retail.
05:23We need to create a body, if you will.
05:26In the United States, five or six years ago, we created the Music Licensing Collective.
05:31There's a law called the Music Modernization Act that was passed, and it allows companies
05:35like Spotify, and YouTube, and Google, instead of paying two million publishers, to pay one
05:41licensing collective, who then pays all the publishers.
05:44We can do that with generative AI, and everybody can share in the value.
05:47How does Section 230 fit into all this?
05:50Well, Section 230, which is related to communications, I think, is actually less important.
05:56It creates safe harbors for internet service providers and people in the communications industry.
06:01I think that, first and foremost, we need to address these common frameworks, and then
06:07the CDA can maybe be amended, if needed.
06:10All right, so you're pointing out a bunch of stuff that makes perfect sense.
06:15Last question, two-part question.
06:18What are the odds that this gets done, and when does it get done?
06:21Well, I think right now, you've got to create certainty for these markets to really thrive.
06:25So if stakeholders start working together, I think it could be done in a couple of years.
06:28All right, we look forward to that.
06:29Thank you, Jason.
06:31Appreciate it.
06:32Appreciate your time.
06:33Thanks.
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