Fair Use or Copyright? Navigating Sociolegal Discourses between AI Companies and Creative Workers

• In Event: 50266 - New Directions and Emerging Studies of Politics in Science and Technology: Changes in Governance, Political Economy, Labor, and Work (Co-sponsored by Section on Political Sociology)

Abstract

Unlike Burawoy's "machine shop" era, contemporary tech companies—especially VC-backed AI startups—operate within financial capitalism where intangible assets and shareholder value maximization dominate profit accumulation (Klinge et al. 2023). These platforms increasingly serve as financial intermediaries whose business models follow venture capital's demand for rapid scaling and early exits, driving them to extract "monopoly rents" regardless of social impact (Langley and Leyshon 2017; Cooiman 2024). As Shestakofsky (2025) observes, tech companies today embody both the makers of their “new products and financial assets” that are fundamentally bound by venture capital investors’ demands.

In this context of financial capitalism, this shift from platform intermediation (Langley and Leyshon 2017) to AI-driven transformation threatens the livelihoods of creative and knowledge workers, as their intellectual and creative labor becomes subject to labor deskilling, data capture, and replication by tech companies (Diakopoulos 2019; Skaggs and Aparicio 2023). Integrating insights from labor process theory and platform studies (Braverman 1974; van Doorn and Badger 2020), this research examines how AI technologies present novel mechanisms of value extraction under rentier capitalism (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2021; Christophers 2020). It pays particular attention to the discursive process in which workers' knowledge is "captured," "thingified," and "assetized" by tech companies, often in ways that undermine workers' legal rights to control the use of their digitized assets (Birch 2020; Briken 2020; Cohen 2019).

This proposed study uses a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling and qualitative analysis, drawing on 10,560 public comments on AI and copyright submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. These comments from diverse stakeholders provide insights into how the capitalist dichotomy between AI corporations and creative workers manifests in their claims around fair use and copyright law. The study examines a shifting corporate discourse, where tech companies pivot toward "open-source" rhetoric, while workers struggle with unpaid labor and diminished control.

This research offers an informative case study on the future of creative work, revealing how platform capitalism's transitions through AI create new mechanisms of dispossession that challenge classic Marxist frameworks and understandings of digital labor.

Authors

• Hayoung Seo, Vanderbilt University

• Jenny L. Davis, Vanderbilt University