Continuing the discussion on why copyright is ill-equipped to address labour displacement caused by GenAI, Part II of Akshat’s post moves beyond copyright to explore alternative frameworks for engaging with the underlying concerns. Akshat is the founder and counsel at AASA Law Chambers. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. He would like to add the following acknowledgements and disclaimer- “Credit to Profs. Oren Bracha and Talha Syed for ideas, and for “The Work of Copyright in the Age of Machine Reproduction” and “LPE of IP.” Credit to Swaraj Barooah for engagement. I have no monetary interest on either side. Disclosure: I represent Flux AI Labs, pro bono, in ANI.”
Part 2: Copyright is the Wrong Answer
By Akshat Agrawal
If Not Copyright, Then What?
How will human creators (or rather humans in general?) survive in an automated, Generative AI driven, market society?
None of what I stated in Part 1 dismisses genuine economic pressures facing humans. Displacement at scale due to Generative AI is real and urgent. My issue is not the diagnosis but the prescription – copyright is the wrong answer.
Remember, labour displacement is a recurring feature of the classic Schumpeterian creative destruction. It is, in fact, inherent and structural to Capitalism. It is nothing new.
The Jacquard loom (1804) encoded weaver pattern-knowledge into punched cards – one boy operating two power looms could produce fifteen times the output of a master weaver, collapsing wages by 76% within three decades. The printing press captured centuries of scribal calligraphy into metal typefaces—scribes attacked Gutenberg’s presses in 1476; the Venetian scribe Filippo de Strata petitioned the Doge to ban printing. Automated telephone exchanges, beginning with Strowger’s 1892 invention, encoded operator routing expertise into switching algorithms – a profession that employed 350,000 women at peak, roughly one in every thirteen working women, now employs fewer than 1,500. In each case: technology learned from human expertise, displaced humans. But such displacement never stalled the printing press (when it replaced scribes) or GPS when it made cartographers (once specifically protected by copyright law) and their labour largely obsolete in the quest of efficiency. There was no extension of property claims or any kind of licensing regime that resolved anything.
I agree, yes, given large scale work displacement concerns at the same time, not just in the creative/content industry but in many other vocations as well (take for instance – chauffeurs given self-driving cars AI’s scale demands some regulatory response as it challenges the nature of “work” itself, However, it doesn’t logically follow that bloating the (already bloated) concept of copyright is the right way to go. Copyright is not that power law.
Copyright addresses a specific problem: enabling humans who face a gap between production costs and copying costs qua specific work (often referred to as copyright’s atom) through creation of transactional exclusivity. Copyright is not designed to guarantee livelihoods. It lets those who choose expression as a vocation recoup costs/get fair recompense through exclusive markets for their specific workfor a limited period of time – due to the inherent non rivalry associated with the resource. This is functional – to ensure society sees a proliferation of creative works and creators continue doing this fundamentally important act of cultural proliferation. But if creative works continue to exist, cultural proliferation in fact increases, whether produced by humans, machines, or human-machine collaboration – copyright becomes redundant.
It is important for policy makers to understand that Generative AI is qualitatively different from past disruptions: it threatens writers, artists, coders, lawyers, translators, and analysts simultaneously, across sectors and geographies. This demands neither property expansion, nor the sheer ignorance with which we historically let individual professions fade into obsolescence. Markets will not correct themselves. What worked, where it worked, was not extending property but the opposite: removing the basic conditions of life from market exposure altogether; Social insurance; Transition support. When technological change threatens to reduce human labour to a disposable input, the response cannot be to give workers a better bargaining chip within the market – because the market is precisely what is rendering their labour dispensable. It must be to secure their basic conditions of existence outside the market logic. Copyright does the opposite. It attempts to shield from market subjection through instruments that deepen market dependency.
From Enclosure to Provision
Let me explain: Why can property claims not work? Because property works on commodification, creating value around a produced “unit.” Displacement does not take a “unit.” It forecloses a role. You can own a song. You cannot own “being someone who makes songs for a living.” AI is commodifying the role itself. Thus, what AI threatens is not competition with existing works but rather the enclosure of creative capacity itself. A property right over yesterday’s output does nothing to protect tomorrow’s ability to create. Worse, property is alienable. Most creators have already transferred copyrights to publishers, labels, platforms, simply to participate in the market at all (and almost always without receiving any monetary compensation). Expand the right and you expand what intermediaries hold, not what displaced humans receive. If the entire market structure for creative work is collapsing, fortifying property rights within that structure is reinforcing walls of a building whose foundation is giving way
None of this is to say technology is the enemy. The same tools that threaten displacement also democratize creation – lowering barriers, expanding who gets to make, enabling forms of expression previously inaccessible to those without capital or institutional backing. The question was never whether to resist the technology. It is whether we build the social conditions that let humans flourish alongside it rather than be discarded by it. And that is precisely what property or expanding cannot do. Social protection works differently. It cannot be assigned away. Focus ought to be on safeguarding creative capacityand enabling market survival. A one-time license fee cannot achieve that. That is why property expansion has never been, and cannot be, the answer to displacement.
If the concern is preserving human creative practice, for its intrinsic value, for breakthrough creativity beyond established patterns, the answer is tools that nurture i.e., provide more access, exposure and de-commodified security for humansrather than more enclosure. For instance, direct support: public funding, cultural pools, institutional investment in creating conditions for creative practice by humans, income security so people can create without fear of destitution. Expanding enclosures, as Rahul Matthan points out, will spillover to human-to-human copyright transactions.
When markets treat human labour as disposable, effective responses have always been social reforms that decommodified means of support for labour and embedded it with positive social provision, rather than property expansions that further entrenched the market logic and enclosure. Copyright is only a way to procrastinate the urgent need of structural reform to the way we look at the concept/nature of “work” or “labour” as the determinant of “value” in a market society [Labour theory of value? Value theory of labour? Who knows…]. The procrastination won’t last long, as this is not a job fit for copyright.
