AI's Free Pass on IP: Are We Just Letting It Steal?

This post was written by Camp Developer Relations Engineer Charlene Nicer and was first published Feb 7, 2025 on Substack.

Is AI being set up as the copyright wild card? While courts remain unsettled, tech giants continue full speed ahead—scraping, training, and generating, with creators left holding the bag.

What is IP?

IP includes patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Formally, it refers to the rights granted to creations of the mind—inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names, and images used in commerce.

For creators, IP is everything. It’s the legal recognition that your work belongs to you and that you have the right to control how it’s used, distributed, and monetized.

The AI Training Problem

When AI companies train their models, they consume vast amounts of data—text, images, code, music, and more. Much of this data is scraped from the internet without explicit permission from creators.

The argument from AI companies often goes: “It’s fair use” or “The data is publicly available.” But publicly available doesn’t mean freely usable for commercial purposes, and fair use has never been tested at this scale.

Who’s Really Losing?

• Artists whose styles are replicated without credit
• Writers whose work trains models that compete with them
• Musicians whose compositions inform AI-generated tracks
• Photographers whose images train visual AI
• Developers whose code trains coding assistants

The irony? These same creators are often the ones using AI tools—tools trained on their own work.

The Legal Landscape

Courts around the world are grappling with these questions:

1. Does training on copyrighted material constitute infringement?
2. Who owns AI-generated content?
3. Can AI outputs that closely resemble training data be considered derivative works?

There’s no clear consensus yet, and different jurisdictions are taking different approaches.

What Camp Network is Building

At Camp Network, we believe the solution isn’t to stop AI—it’s to build infrastructure that ensures creators are recognized and compensated.

Our Proof of Provenance protocol creates an immutable record of:

• Who created what
• What licenses apply
• How content can be used
• How royalties should flow

This means AI companies could train on properly licensed data with clear terms, and creators could finally participate in the value their work generates.

The Path Forward

The answer isn’t litigation—it’s infrastructure. We need systems that make doing the right thing easy:

• Clear provenance for all creative work
• Programmable licensing that scales
• Automatic royalty distribution
• Transparent audit trails

This is what Camp Network is building. Join us.

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