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Big Tech just won big in the battle over data and copyright. The implications for business, publishing, and the future of the web are profound.
Two recent US court rulings, including one in favor of Anthropic's use of millions of books for AI training, have nudged the legal consensus closer to this reality: All content published online is now fair game. Companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft may never have to pay for the text, images, or video they ingest to power their AI tools.
This is a huge win for Big Tech and the new AI economy. But it could upend the web and the creators who keep it vibrant. If AI can repackage all digital knowledge in milliseconds, the value of the written word, and probably other content, plunges. For now, judges seem unpersuaded by the US Copyright Office's argument that this flood of new content undermines the market for the original material. For now, fair use appears to protect the AI giants.
Cloudflare, which runs one of the largest networks on the web, is pushing back with a new tool to make AI pay-per-crawl, shifting the paradigm from opt-out to opt-in. Publishers including The Atlantic, Ziff Davis, and Time are on board.
These rulings could drive a deeper shift. Now that the content-scraping shackles are off, creators may rethink how and where they share knowledge online. Bloomberg keeps its news stories inside the Terminal. Tech blogger Ben Thompson uses newsletters and stays firmly behind a paywall. And Microsoft's new "Signal" magazine? Print-only.
In a world where AI bots roam freely, the most valuable ideas may move offline or go dark. A new era of scarcity, privacy — and maybe even paper — may be just beginning.
