Staff Reports
The latest dust‑up over AI and copyright makes one thing clear: the fight isn’t just tech bros versus old media. It’s the Justice Department siding with Silicon Valley on a sweeping legal theory, and conservative lawyer Mike Davis has publicly told the Trump DOJ to back off. His Fox News op‑ed calling for withdrawal of the DOJ’s Statement of Interest puts property rights and creators front and center — and that’s the angle conservatives should care about.
What the DOJ actually did — and why it sparked outrage
The Department of Justice, through a Statement of Interest filed in the multi‑district New York litigation, told the court that copying copyrighted text to “train” large language models can qualify as fair use. The filing, signed in the Civil Division and carrying the names of Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. and Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, narrows its argument to the training stage but frames the issue as crucial to U.S. competitiveness and national security. In plain language: the DOJ signaled it won’t let copyright rules slow down Big Tech’s AI engines — and that message set off alarms from creators and conservative legal thinkers alike.
Why Mike Davis is right to demand withdrawal
Mike Davis argues the DOJ’s stance is “ill‑advised” because it risks legalizing mass scraping of copyrighted work without payment. That’s not hyperbole. If courts accept the idea that training LLMs is routinely “transformative,” the leverage creators and independent publishers have to demand licensing could evaporate. Davis is right to point out the simple principle at stake: property rights. Conservatives who care about markets and creators should not applaud a government posture that essentially hands over other people’s work to trillion‑dollar firms for free.
National security talk shouldn’t be a free pass for theft
The DOJ leans hard on competitiveness and national security — suggesting that restricting training data risks ceding ground to China. That’s a convenient argument, but it shouldn’t become a catch‑all excuse to sideline the rule of law. Winning the AI race doesn’t require abandoning markets that respect property rights. Licensing systems exist and can scale; tech giants have the capital to pay for content the same way streaming services do. If you think Spotify’s model ruined the music business, you’ll be thrilled to hear how streaming actually pays songwriters — no, really.
What should happen next
The sensible pathway is straightforward. The DOJ should withdraw the Statement of Interest or at least clarify that it does not endorse wholesale, unremunerated use of copyrighted works for commercial AI training. Congress can and should step in with clearer rules that balance innovation and creators’ rights. Courts should treat the government filing as persuasive, not dispositive, and decide the case on a careful reading of fair use — not on a policy memo wrapped in national‑security rhetoric.
At stake here is more than a legal technicality. It’s whether America will defend property rights or let them be eroded in the name of speed and scale. If the Trump DOJ wants to remain a true conservative force for markets and creators, it will listen to Mike Davis — and the many creators who will lose out if the government quietly hands the commons to Silicon Valley. That’s the test of whether this administration will protect American innovators or hand them a raw deal in the name of keeping up with rivals.
