The history of technology is replete with copyright panics. In the 1980s, major rightsholders famously likened videotape recorders (VTRs) to the "Boston strangler" of the film industry. However, the Supreme Court wisely rejected such hyperbole, recognizing the VTR's capacity for non-infringing uses like time-shifting and cautioning against rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. This sentiment echoes earlier anxieties, from composer **John Phillip Sousa's** fears that player pianos would destroy music composition to portrait artists' concerns that cameras would render their craft obsolete. In each instance, these fears proved unfounded, often leading to unexpected creative booms and new forms of expression, such as photojournalism. Copyright's fundamental purpose is to promote new markets, ideas, and creators, not to entrench existing gatekeepers or stifle innovation. Using copyright to exclusively protect the profits of massive rightsholders ultimately benefits neither the public nor individual artists. ### The Latest Wave of Litigation Generative AI has triggered the latest wave of anxiety, leading to a surge of litigation across the U.S. and globally. Rightsholders are urging courts to dramatically expand copyright protections based largely on speculation and a "market dilution" theory. This theory suggests that building generative AI tools cannot constitute fair use because these tools might encourage the proliferation of competing works. As the **Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)** has argued in amicus briefs for cases like ***Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC*** and ***In re Mosaic LLM Litigation***, this interpretation fundamentally misunderstands copyright law. Accepting such a theory would undermine copyright's constitutional objective: to foster the creation of expressive works for public benefit. Copyright law punishes infringement, not competition, and is designed to encourage building upon existing works. This "market dilution" theory would not only dismantle the fair use doctrine but also other crucial limits on copyright. These limits prevent rightsholders from unfairly suppressing competition by claiming broad ownership over tropes, genres, and styles. The consequence would be an unchecked veto power for publishers over any expression that might conceivably compete with their owned works, leading to a chilling effect on creativity and idea sharing. ### Dispelling Misconceptions About AI and Creativity Plaintiffs in these cases often make two key errors. First, research indicates that large generative AI models are unlikely to produce infringing works. The more data a model is trained on, the less any individual training example influences a specific output. Second, AI tools are not inherently displacing human creativity; rather, they are augmenting it. Consider these examples: * Boston-based artist **Nettrice Gaskins** utilizes AI to create Afro-futurist art, including a portrait of **Octavia Butler** displayed at the San Francisco Airport. * Indian artists **Prateek Arora** and **Varun Gupta** employ generative AI to reimagine Western science fiction. * Philadelphia-based artist **Alex Smith** uses generative AI to reinterpret Afrofuturism with queer, plus-sized Black superheroes. * **Ana Miljački**, an MIT architecture professor, used generative AI to produce a "non-linear documentary" film on Yugoslav World War II memorials. * A research-creation project used AI-generated visual art to amplify voices in the Iran Woman Life Freedom Movement and evaluate AI's role in sociopolitical advocacy. * AI company **Bronze** collaborates with musicians like **Disclosure** and **Jai Paul** to create dynamic songs that evolve with each listen, challenging traditional musical conceptions. Courts should refrain from dictating what constitutes "human creativity" or pre-judging the tools that foster it. Like the VTR, large language models are general-purpose tools, used by humans for a vast array of purposes beyond simple lyric generation. While this technological innovation will undoubtedly be far-reaching and disruptive, potentially causing harm in some areas, distorting copyright law is not the appropriate remedy for these challenges.