David will be a panelist on a day-long workshop at Stanford Graduate School of Business on competition and antitrust issues in artificial intelligence. The workshop is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and SGBS. You can live stream on YouTube.

David’s panel goes off at 3:35 pm PT, and you’ll see some old friends are also on the panel and we’re looking forward to hearing from the new friends.

David wrote a new paper for the workshop link is here, but here’s a teaser for you:

If inclusion in AI data sets becomes a lucrative new use for copyrighted music, potentially displacing other existing income streams, requiring these training uses to be licensed is critical to keep in the place the same positive incentives that encourage creation and recording of new music today. If a major future use becomes un-protected and un-monetizable, music creation itself would become destabilized and decay.

Strong copyright on the data side will also set in motion real competition for access to valuable works for datasets – putting market forces to work to set prices and terms for licensing these works that reward creators and steer rights and access to the developers and innovators who value them the most. Essentially, it puts real innovators and risk taking start-ups on equal footing with tech giants for access to valuable materials to use in creating new AI products – and while Microsoft and its ilk may assume that means the biggest firm will always win, basic economics tells us rights should end up with the bidder who has the best idea and highest value use.