A Marketplace to Solve AI Copyright Woes?
Trip Adler, who co-founded Scribd, thinks his sleek platform can convince AI startups to finally pay up.
Nearly a century ago, Isaac Asimov laid out his Three Laws of Robotics, a set of commandments imagining how artificial beings should interact with humans. The tenets underpin much of modern science fiction, and they tend to knock around in the minds of the people developing modern technology, too.
Trip Adler, a co-founder of Scribd—which has sites for storing documents online and e-book subscriptions—is one of those people. And in paraphrasing Asimov, he would like to propose a concept that amounts to a fourth law: No bot shall read for free.
Adler hopes to push the concept into a reality with Created by Humans, his new startup. It has raised $5 million from investors including Garry Tan, Floodgate Fund’s Mike Maples, Slow Ventures and David Sacks, and is currently closing another funding round. With this money, Adler envisions Created by Humans becoming a thriving digital marketplace where copyright holders and AI companies can easily meet and strike deals to license copyrighted books and other creative works.