We’re in the Wild West of generative AI: Beware the outlaws | Opinion

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Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in the summer of 1999, a start-up company launched an application which instantly became a global phenomenon. We were in the heady days of the Internet bubble, with the dot-com crash still a year away, and the founders of this new company had identified an inflection point in the development of technology.

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning hit upon the moment where network speeds and costs dropped so low that high-quality music files could easily be shared between ordinary users, effectively lowering the cost of distribution for this medium to zero. Their application, Napster, provided an easy way for users to take advantage of this, and the response was instant – within months it had tens of millions of users, an immense number in an era when Internet access was still far from universal.

Enormous amounts of music were transferred over the service, and as well as providing a full catalogue of contemporary popular music, the application became beloved of enthusiasts because it opened up access to music by niche artists, difficult to find albums, and even bootlegs and unreleased tracks.

Napster changed the world of music distribution forever. It pointed a flashing neon finger at a technical reality that many executives in that business would have preferred to ignore – that digital distribution had become entirely inevitable – and paved the way first to digital storefronts and ultimately to the streaming services that now dominate that sector. There was just one problem; Napster didn’t have permission from musicians or publishers to distribute their work.

The whole enterprise was built on stolen content. The