Tech Billionaires Shocked to Learn Copyright Exists, Demand Immediate Redesign of Reality
The world’s most powerful tech executives were left utterly flabbergasted this week when it was revealed to them that intellectual property law does, in fact, exist. This groundbreaking revelation—discovered after a barrage of angry letters from Elton John, Paul McCartney, and thousands of other artists who would prefer not to be digitally strip-mined for content—has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley.
“I just assumed information was a free-for-all,” admitted one stunned CEO, looking genuinely perplexed while rolling in a big pile of money. “Like air. Or my employees’ weekends.”
The controversy centers on the rampant use of copyrighted material to train AI models, a process that, it turns out, amounts to stuffing billions of pages, books, songs, and artworks into a corporate sausage grinder with no intent to compensate the original creators. Until now, Big Tech executives had generously assumed that artists didn’t actually want money, but rather the joy of knowing their work was being consumed by an infinite algorithmic abyss.
Astonishingly, the UK government has taken notice, with the House of Lords debating new legislation that might—brace yourself—force AI companies to pay for the content they gobble up like a dog that just broke into the fridge. This radical idea has been met with fierce opposition from Silicon Valley, whose innovators claim that laws shouldn’t apply to them because, well, they’re busy inventing the future.
“This is discrimination,” sighed a particularly disheveled billionaire at a tech conference. “No one ever tried to stop humans from reading things and, you know, remembering them. Why should it be different just because our machines are doing it at an inhuman, highly profitable, and completely exploitative scale?”
Veteran musicians and authors, meanwhile, have expressed mild irritation at the fact that they have once again been volunteered as financial donors to the tech industry without consent. “I worked my whole life to write songs that mean something to people,” grumbled Paul McCartney. “If I wanted a soulless entity to profit off my work without giving me a cent, I would have just sold my catalog to another record label.”
Legal scholars suggest this debate may lead to AI companies facing the horrendous prospect of “paying for things they take,” a concept so distressing that tech executives are reported to be experiencing genuine human emotions, possibly for the first time.
For now, however, the industry remains defiant. One executive summed up their position succinctly: “Look, we at Big Tech stand for a free and open internet—specifically, free for us and open for looting.”
