25/07/2026
There's a pattern that keeps repeating: whenever there's money to be made, someone with lawyers and leverage finds a legal gap and walks straight through it, while everyone without that leverage gets left holding nothing.
Case in point one. AI companies are buying secondhand books by the truckload, scanning every page, then literally destroying the book. A judge ruled this legal because once you own a physical copy you can do whatever you want with it, including turn it into a digital file for training an AI model. So an author sells a $12 paperback once. That book has years of their actual work in it, their research, their voice, their craft. The company shreds it, feeds it into a model, and that model can now write in something close to their style, forever, for anyone who pays for the subscription. The author never sees another cent. No royalty. No say in it. Perfectly legal, because of how copyright law treats a used book once it's sold.
Case in point two. Journalists and writers used to get paid because people clicked their articles and saw the ads on the page. Now AI tools read the article for you and just hand you the answer, so you never click through at all. One AI company alone reads roughly 4,580 pages for every single visitor it actually sends back to the site. Four thousand five hundred and eighty reads, one click. The journalist did the work, the AI got the value, the writer got almost nothing.
This isn't some rare exception. It's the playbook. Find the loophole nobody thought to close. Extract as much value as you can before regulation catches up. Call it innovation, fair use, disruption, whatever sounds better than what it actually is. The people doing the extracting always have the lawyers to find the gap. The people getting extracted from almost never do.
