A for Effort: How AI Upends Copyright Law

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A for Effort: How AI Upends Copyright Law<br>TL;DR: Copyright protects expression and leaves ideas free, because expression was the costly thing to produce. AI makes expression cheap and moves the value to judgment and taste.

Shruti Rajagopalan<br>Jun 05, 2026

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Last week I stood in front of three tapestries at The Met, each more than fifteen feet tall, and woven from Raphael’s original designs decades after his death. It got me thinking about how AI fundamentally inverts the economic problem copyright law was built to solve.<br>The Raphael: Sublime Poetry exhibit culminates with the replicas of three of Raphael’s famous tapestries and their fascinating story. Soon after his election in 1513, Pope Leo X set Raphael to design a series of ten tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, the Acts of the Apostles, to hang below Michelangelo’s ceiling. Raphael and his workshop spent 1515 and 1516 painting the full-scale cartoons, the working designs, on pasted sheets of paper, detailed enough to be turned into wool, silk, and metal thread. Seeing the drawings and preparatory studies displayed at the exhibit is a small sample of the herculean effort. Before weaving, they would be rendered in reverse, because the loom would flip them.

Raphael was paid about a thousand ducats for the designs. The weaving in Pieter van Aelst’s Brussels workshop cost around fifteen thousand more, enough that Leo’s spending left the papal treasury in debt by the time he died.<br>That is the cost of the first tapestries, one that almost bankrupted the famously profligate Pope Leo X.<br>A few rooms on, the exhibit hangs three of those tapestries, woven not for the Vatican but for Philip II of Spain in the late 1540s or early 1550s, a generation after Raphael’s death, from a second weaving of his designs by Jan van Tieghem and Frans Gheteels. The three — The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Christ’s Charge to Peter, and Paul and Barnabas at Lystra — are on loan from the Spanish royal collection and had never been shown outside Madrid until now. The original cartoons Raphael’s own hand had worked were not there, since the surviving ones have hung in London at the Victoria and Albert for over a century, but these were woven from the same compositions. Three exquisite tapestries, but copies of Raphael’s original design.<br>Standing in front of these extraordinary tapestries, I saw the point copyright law turns on, and why copyright law wasn’t needed to protect Raphael. These tapestries were cheaper than the first set, because the design had already been done and paid for. But they were not cheap. Reproducing the work meant another team of weavers, another loom, another year, another fortune in thread. When the only way to copy a thing was to make it again almost from scratch, with enormous human effort and mastery over the loom, the copy cost nearly as much as the original. No one needed a law to stop it, because the expense stopped it. In fact, only the most extraordinary works of art would be replicated because of the cost, and it made more sense to credit the master to justify the expense. The value of these tapestries increased by crediting Raphael, not denying him.<br>Copyright became necessary only when replication got cheap, when the printing press and the engraving could throw off a Raphael composition for the cost of paper and ink, no workshop of artists, no loom, no weavers. It is with these changes in technology that the first original effort needed protecting, because that is the moment it could be taken for nothing.<br>AI is another technological disruption, but instead of making copying cheaper, it makes the first expression cheaper.<br>Share<br>Expression, not Ideas

Copyright protects the way something is written, drawn, or sung, but not the inherent idea that is expressed. One can own one’s sentences. No one can own the broader point made by their sentence. If written today, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” would be protected by copyright. But Hamlet’s core story – a young prince whose father, the king, is murdered by a treacherous uncle who seizes the throne, until the prince returns to avenge his father and reclaim what was taken – is not protected by copyright. Which is just as well because it is also the story of The Lion King.<br>The reason the law is designed this way is that writing something original the first time is expensive and copying it afterward is cheaper. If the law let anyone sell copies the moment a book appeared, the price would fall to the cost of copying and the author would never earn back the cost of writing, so the book would not get written. Copyright solves this by giving the author a monopoly over copies for a limited time, which holds the price high enough, for long enough, to pay for the first original effort. That is the case for protecting expression. Protect the expression and writing can be compensated. Protect the idea and most writing becomes...