We’ve reported for years about how data centers are a good explanation for why Senators like Ron Wyden seem to always inject themselves into copyright legislation for the sole purpose of slowing it down or killing it, watering it down, or turning it on its head. Why would a senator from Oregon–a state that gave us Courtney Love, Esperanza Spalding, The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney and the Dandy Warhols–be so such an incredibly basic, no-vibe cosplayer?
Easy answer–he does the bidding of the Big Tech data center operators sucking down that good taxpayer subsidized Oregon hydroelectric power–literally and figuratively. Big Tech loves them some weak copyright and expanded loopholes that let them get away with some hard core damage to artists. Almost as much as they love flexing political muscle.
Senator Wyden with his hand in his own pocket.
This is coming up again in the various public comments on artificial intelligence, which is the data hog of data hogs. For example, the Artist Rights Institute made this point using Oregon as an example in the recent UK Intellectual Property Office call for public comments that produced a huge push back on the plans of UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer to turn Britain into a Google lake for AI, especially the build out of AI data centers.
Google Data Center at The Dalles, Oregon
The thrust of the Oregon discussion in the ARI comment is that Oregon’s experience with data centers should be food for thought in other places (like the UK) as what seems to happen is electricity prices for local rate payers increase while data centers have negotiated taxpayer subsidized discounts. Yes, that old corporate welfare strikes again.
Oregon Taxpayers’ Experience with Crowding Out by Data Centres is a Cautionary Tale for UK
We call the IPO’s attention to the real-world example of the U.S. State of Oregon, a state that is roughly the geographical size of the UK. Google built the first Oregon data centre in The Dalles, Oregon in 2006. Oregon now has 125 of the very data centres that Big Tech will necessarily need to build in the UK to implement AI. In other words, Oregon was sold much the same story that Big Tech is selling you today.
The rapid growth of Oregon data centres driven by the same tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, Oracle, and Meta, has significantly increased Oregon’s demand for electricity. This surge in demand has led to higher power costs, which are often passed on to local rate payers while data centre owners receive tax benefits. This increase in price foreshadows the market effect of crowding out local rate payers in the rush for electricity to run AI—demand will only increase and increase substantially as we enter what the International Energy Agency has called “the age of electricity”.[1]
Portland General Electric, a local power operator, has faced increasing criticism for raising rates to accommodate the encroaching electrical power needs of these data centers. Local residents argue that they unfairly bear the increased electrical costs while data centers benefit from tax incentives and other advantages granted by government.[2]
This is particularly galling in that the hydroelectric power in Oregon is largely produced by massive taxpayer-funded hydroelectric and other power projects built long ago.[3] The relatively recent 125 Oregon data centres received significant tax incentives during their construction to be offset by a promise of future jobs. While there were new temporary jobs created during the construction phase of the data centres, there are relatively few permanent jobs required to operate them long term as one would expect from digitized assets owned by AI platforms.
Of course, the UK has approximately 16 times the population of Oregon. Given this disparity, it seems plausible that whatever problems that Oregon has with the concentration of data centers, the UK will have those same problems many times over due to the concentration of populations.
Will AI Produce the Oregon Effect Internationally?
So let’s look at a quick and dirty comparison of the prices that local residents and businesses pay for electricity compared to what data centers in the same states pay. We’re posting this chart because ya’ll love numbers, but mostly to start discussion and research into just how much of an impact all these data centers might have on the supply and demand price setting in a few representative state and countries. But remember this–our experience with Senator Wyden should tell you that all these data centers will give Big Tech even more political clout than they already have.
The chart shows the percentage difference between the residential rate and the data center rate for energy in each state measured. The percentage difference is calculated as: ((Residential Rate – Data Center Rate) ÷ Residential Rate) × 100. When we say “~X% lower” we mean that the data center price per kilowatt hour (¢/kWh) is approximately X% lower than the residential rate, all based on data from Choose Energy or Electricity Plans. We don’t pretend to be energy analysts, so if we got this wrong, someone will let us know.
On a country by country comparison, here’s some more food for thought:
As you can see, most of the G7 countries have significantly higher electricity prices (and therefore potentially higher data prices) than the US and Canada. This suggests that Big Tech data centers will produce the Oregon Effect in those countries with higher residential energy costs in a pre-AI world. That in turn suggests that Big Tech is going to be coming around with their tin cup for corporate welfare to keep their data center electric bills low, or maybe they’ll just buy the electric plants. For themselves.
Either way, it’s unlikely that this data center thumb on the scale and the corporate welfare that goes with it will cause energy prices to decline. And you can just forget that whole Net Zero thing.
If you don’t like where this is going, call your elected representative!
Forming a songwriter union is a hot topic these days, thank you Chappell Roan! Artist Rights Institute put a casual poll in the field to get a sense of what people are thinking about this issue. If you haven’t taken that poll yet, please join us on Survey Monkey here (all results are anonymized) we would love to get your feedback. We will post the results on Trichordist.
Reaction to the poll led to an Artist Rights Institute podcast with Chris Castle and Kevin Casini who both fans of the Trichordist audience, so naturally they wanted to launch the podcast here. There are a number of resources mentioned in the podcast that we have linked to below. Please leave comments if you have questions!
We will be coming back to this topic soon. Feel free to leave comments if you have questions or want us to focus on any particular point.
Copyright 2025 Artist Rights Institute. All Rights Reserved. This video or any transcript may not be used for text or data mining or for the purpose of training artificial intelligence models or systems.
We will be posting excerpts from the Artist Rights Institute’s comment in the UK’s Intellectual Property Office proceeding on AI and copyright. That proceeding is called a “consultation” where the Office solicits comments from the public (wherever located) about a proposed policy.
In this case it was the UK government’s proposal to require creators to “opt out” of AI data scraping by expanding the law in the UK governing “text and data mining” which is what Silicon Valley wants in a big way. This idea produced an enormous backlash from the creative community that we’ll also be covering in coming weeks as it’s very important that Trichordist readers be up to speed on the latest skulduggery by Big Tech in snarfing down all the world’s culture to train their AI (which has already happened and now has to be undone). For a backgrounder on the “text and data mining” controversy, watch this video by George York of the Digital Creators Coalition speaking at the Artist Rights Institute in DC.
In this section of the comment we offer a simple rule of thumb or policy guideline by which to measure the Government’s rules (which could equally apply in America): Can an artist file a criminal complaint against someone like Sam Altman?
If an artist is more likely to be able to get the police to stop their car from being stolen off the street than to get the police to stop the artist’s life’s work from being stolen online by a heavily capitalized AI platform, the policy will fail
Why Can’t Creators Call 999 [or 911]?
We suggest a very simple policy guideline—if an artist is more likely to be able to get the police to stop their car from being stolen off the street than to get the police to stop the artist’s life’s work from being stolen online by a heavily capitalized AI platform, the policy will fail. Alternatively, if an artist can call the police and file a criminal complaint against a Sam Altman or a Sergei Brin for criminal copyright infringement, now we are getting somewhere.
This requires that there be a clear “red light/green light” instruction that can easily be understood and applied by a beat copper. This may seem harsh, but in our experience with the trillion-dollar market cap club, the only thing that gets their attention is a legal action that affects behavior rather than damages. Our experience suggests that what gets their attention most quickly is either an injunction to stop the madness or prison to punish the wrongdoing.
As a threshold matter, it is clear that AI platforms intend to continue scraping all the world’s culture for their purposes without obtaining consent or notifying rightsholders. It is likely that the bigger platforms already have. For example, we have found our own writings included in CoPilot outputs. Not only did we not consent to that use, but we were also never asked. Moreover, CoPilot’s use of these works clearly violates our terms of service. This level of content scraping is hardly what was contemplated with the “data mining” exceptions.
The Artist Rights Institute filed a comment in the UK Intellectual Property Office’s consultation on Copyright and AI that we drafted. The Trichordist will be posting excerpts from that comment from time to time.
Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets.
We strongly disagree that all the world’s culture can be squeezed through the keyhole of “data” to be “mined” as a matter of legal definitions. In fact, a recent study by leading European scholars have found that data mining exceptions were never intended to excuse copyright infringement:
Generative AI is transforming creative fields by rapidly producing texts, images, music, and videos. These AI creations often seem as impressive as human-made works but require extensive training on vast amounts of data, much of which are copyright protected. This dependency on copyrighted material has sparked legal debates, as AI training involves “copying” and “reproducing” these works, actions that could potentially infringe on copyrights. In defense, AI proponents in the United States invoke “fair use” under Section 107 of the [US] Copyright Act [a losing argument in the one reported case on point[1]], while in Europe, they cite Article 4(1) of the 2019 DSM Directive, which allows certain uses of copyrighted works for “text and data mining.”
This study challenges the prevailing European legal stance, presenting several arguments:
1. The exception for text and data mining should not apply to generative AI training because the technologies differ fundamentally – one processes semantic information only, while the other also extracts syntactic information.
2. There is no suitable copyright exception or limitation to justify the massive infringements occurring during the training of generative AI. This concerns the copying of protected works during data collection, the full or partial replication inside the AI model, and the reproduction of works from the training data initiated by the end-users of AI systems like ChatGPT….[2]
Moreover, the existing text and data mining exception in European law was never intended to address AI scraping and training:
Axel Voss, a German centre-right member of the European parliament, who played a key role in writing the EU’s 2019 copyright directive, said that law was not conceived to deal with generative AI models: systems that can generate text, images or music with a simple text prompt.[3]
Confounding culture with data to confuse both the public and lawmakers requires a vulpine lust that we haven’t seen since the breathless Dot Bomb assault on both copyright and the public financial markets. This lust for data, control and money will drive lobbyists and Big Tech’s amen corner to seek copyright exceptions under the banner of “innovation.” Any country that appeases AI platforms in the hope of cashing in on tech at the expense of culture will be appeasing their way towards an inevitable race to the bottom. More countries can be predictably expected to offer ever more accommodating terms in the face of Silicon Valley’s army of lobbyists who mean to engage in a lightning strike across the world. The fight for the survival of culture is on. The fight for survival of humanity may literally be the next one up.
We are far beyond any reasonable definition of “text and data mining.” What we can expect is for Big Tech to seek to distract both creators and lawmakers with inapt legal diversions such as trying to pretend that snarfing down all with world’s creations is mere “text and data mining”. The ensuing delay will allow AI platforms to enlarge their training databases, raise more money, and further the AI narrative as they profit from the delay and capital formation.
[1]Thomson-Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc., (Case No. 1:20-cv-00613 U.S.D.C. Del. Feb. 11, 2025) (Memorandum Opinion, Doc. 770 rejecting fair use asserted by defendant AI platform) available at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.72109/gov.uscourts.ded.72109.770.0.pdf (“[The AI platform]’s use is not transformative because it does not have a ‘further purpose or different character’ from [the copyright owner]’s [citations omitted]…I consider the “likely effect [of the AI platform’s copying]”….The original market is obvious: legal-research platforms. And at least one potential derivative market is also obvious: data to train legal AIs…..Copyrights encourage people to develop things that help society, like [the copyright owner’s] good legal-research tools. Their builders earn the right to be paid accordingly.” Id. at 19-23). See also Kevin Madigan, First of Its Kind Decision Finds AI Training Is Not Fair Use, Copyright Alliance (Feb. 12, 2025) available at https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-training-not-fair-use/ (discussion of AI platform’s landmark loss on fair use defense).
[2] Professor Tim W. Dornis and Professor Sebastian Stober, Copyright Law and Generative AI Training – Technological and Legal Foundations, Recht und Digitalisierung/Digitization and the Law (Dec. 20, 2024)(Abstract) available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4946214.
In a rare treat, Abby North and Chris Castle got to speak with New Orleans attorney Tim Kappel about his client’s case Vetter v. Resnick. The landmark case stands for winning the long-fought principle that termination rights in copyright cause the transfer of the worldwide copyright not just US rights as had been the business practice. The case is a major victory for songwriters and their heirs.
Cyril Vetter and Don Smith co-wrote the song “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in 1962. They assigned all their interests in the song to Windsong Music Publishers. Vetter later served a termination notice on Resnick to recapture his rights under the U.S. Copyright Act, arguing that this termination applied globally, not just in the U.S. Resnick rejected Vetter’s global termination and Vetter sued for declaratory relief in the Middle District of Louisiana.
In a major win for songwriters and their heirs, Chief District Judge Shelly D. Dick agreed with Vetter, granting him worldwide rights to the song, which contradicted established but inequitable business practices in the U.S. music publishing industry. In the podcast, Chris Castle and Abby North discuss the case with Vetter’s attorney, Tim Kappel. These documents are referenced in the podcast.
As you probably already know, the statutory mechanical royalty rate for physical or downloads (not streaming) has increased as of January 1, 2025. This means that all floating rate licenses (e.g., not subject to controlled comp rates) should have increased as of January 1, 2025 from 12.4¢ to 12.7¢ due to the Phonorecords IV cost of living adjustment. (And of course should have increased in prior PR IV years in 24.). And of course we have Trichordist readers to thank for helping to persuade the Copyright Royalty Judges to reject the Phonorecords IV frozen mechanical rate settlement that led to the labels agreeing to an increase from 9.1¢ to 12¢ plus a cost of living adjustment on physical and downloads that rose to 12.4¢ in 2024 and now to 12.7¢ in 2025. (But remember there is no cost of living adjustment for streaming mechanicals like Spotify.)
It’s probably just a glitch, but I understand that HFA hasn’t updated the 1/1/25 rates yet for “licensing out” in at least one instance (see screen capture below obtained this week). I’m inclined to believe that the issue is with the database and would not be a one-off, but I could be wrong. That suggests to me that every songwriter and publisher with either a newly issued license since 1/1/25 or a floating rate license in place during PR IV rate period (2023-2027) should probably confirm that the respective COLA escalations have been properly applied as of January 1 of 2024 and 2025. I would imagine that this isn’t an isolated incident, but maybe it is. No reason to let grass grow, however.
Here’s the Copyright Royalty Board’s timely notice of the new rate effective 1/1/25–which means that the HFA system does not appear to have been updated unless the screen capture reflects a one-off which seems doubtful to me.
And for reference, this is the rate for 2024 with the COLA adjustment that may also have been misapplied–everyone would have to check to know if it was misapplied to them.
If you’re affected by the Los Angeles fires, you may want to determine if you are eligible for funding by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Hypebot has a handy page devoted to resources for those affected by the fires that you can access here.
It’s always a good idea to let FEMA tell you what the current rules are that apply to your particular situation as these may change. The basic rules are available on the FEMA website and are quite extensive. You can access the FEMA rules on FEMA’s website here. This falls under the general heading of “eligibility requirements for FEMA assistance”. This post is not meant to be legal advice, just a heads up about some of the bureaucracy involved with disaster relief.
Some of this involves proving who you are, your citizenship status, residence and a few other things. FEMA lists the kinds of documents they accept to prove eligibility. As these are also the kinds of documents that may get lost in a rushed exit from your residence in the face of a fire or were stored in bank safe deposit box in a bank that burned down, consider how you are going to get these documents together. If you have been blessed enough not to have been affected by the fires, consider organizing these documents in an cloud based or paper folder that you can grab in a hurry or access online at any time (or both).
Sometimes you may be eligible for a crowd funded charitable source of money like gofundme. Realize that this very likely has to be disclosed to FEMA and is addressed in their online FAQ:
When individuals apply for federal emergency aid through FEMA, FEMA assesses their needs and what aid they have already received from other sources. This includes any funds raised through platforms like GoFundMe.
Here’s how it generally works:
Duplication of Benefits: FEMA’s assistance is designed to help individuals and communities recover from disasters, and it cannot duplicate the benefits received from other sources. If fire victims receive aid through GoFundMe or other donations for the same expenses FEMA would cover (like home repairs, temporary housing, medical expenses, etc.), those funds might be counted against the federal assistance they’re eligible for.
Transparency and Documentation: When applying for federal aid, it’s crucial for individuals to be transparent about all the financial assistance they have received. FEMA will require documentation of all income sources, including any funds from GoFundMe.
Types of Assistance: While GoFundMe can provide immediate relief for specific needs, FEMA assistance covers a broader range of recovery efforts. It’s important to understand that FEMA provides different types of aid which might not be addressed by GoFundMe campaigns, such as grants for rebuilding and repair, rental assistance, and other necessary expenses not covered by insurance.
To sum it up:
Setting up a GoFundMe page doesn’t automatically disqualify fire victims from FEMA aid.
It’s important to disclose all received funds when applying for federal assistance to avoid duplication of benefits.
GoFundMe donations might affect the amount of federal aid provided, depending on the use of the funds.
It may help to state that a GoFundMe is to cover items not covered by FEMA with the understanding that you will likely have the need before you get approved by FEMA, and the GoFundMe monies may be available sooner than the FEMA monies. There will likely be a true up between the two at some point.
The Trichordist 
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