The brewing dispute over a (purportedly - more on that below) AI-generated George Carlin standup special is starting to feel like another step in the long tradition of rightsholders claiming that normal activity needs their permission when done with computers.

This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.

This post originally appeared on the OSHWA blog .

I recently found myself reading Mark Lemley’s paper The Benefit of the Bargain while also helping a friend put together the Terms of Service (ToS) for their new startup. Lemley’s paper essentially argues that modern ToS - documents that are written by services to be one sided and essentially imposed on users as a take-it-or-leave-it offer - should no longer be enforced as contracts because they have lost important fairness elements of what make contracts contracts.

Earlier this summer the Engelberg Center released a new study on ebook ownership. The study was motivated by a superficially simple question: “why can’t you own an ebook?”.