21 July

The deliberate conflation of learning with copyright in this debate. Training is not stealing. Copyright is to take somebody else’s work and to use or sell it as your own. But to train is to learn. We have never taxed or monetised actual learning in this way. When you buy a book, you don’t pay extra for what you learn from the book. It’s not an IP issue either. To learn is not to appropriate somebody’s IP. To take what you learn and use it to earn money is not the appropriation of IP either. Imagine existing broadcasters advocating to shut down journalism schools, because the journalists they train will compete with their existing journalists. That’s the equivalent of what we’re seeing here. The status quo will tie itself in knots to resist this technological revolution. It’s what a status quo always does.