Unprecedented! Copyright is being dismantled by AI—will the next collapse be the narrative barriers of $BTC and $ETH?

The wheels of technology roll over, and the flow of human attention is redistributed time and again, while the old fortress of copyright is accelerating its disintegration amid the digital torrent. This is not alarmism, but a structural collapse that has been ongoing for over twenty years. Our proud “originality” is becoming fragile in the face of algorithms.

The copyright system itself is a product of a technological revolution. It was born in an era when printing technology was widespread, with the core being the “right of reproduction,” which guarantees returns on intellectual effort by artificially creating scarcity. However, this foundation was built in a world where physical copies could be controlled and information spread slowly. The emergence of the internet has begun to crack this high wall.

The first stage is the search era. Search engines like Google must crawl and cache content to index the entire web. This sparked early controversy: does unauthorized copying constitute infringement? Ultimately, the industry self-regulated through “web crawler protocols,” and laws exempted such activities under the “safe harbor principle,” with the landmark “Kelly v. Arriba” ruling establishing that copying for thumbnail indexing qualifies as “fair use.” Essentially, content creators, in order to be “discovered,” have surrendered part of their “reproduction rights.” The boundaries of copyright were first penetrated by technological logic.

The second stage is the information flow era. Platforms are no longer just “gateways” to content but have become “containers.” The entire user consumption process occurs within the platform, without redirects. This has fundamentally changed the rules of the game. Distribution rights replaced reproduction rights as the core resource. Traffic gates are controlled by platforms, and creators have downgraded from independent copyright owners to production units within the platform ecosystem. Their original hard advertising business models have been destroyed, with monetization paths compressed into platform revenue sharing and native advertising, even requiring paid promotion to push their content. The economic significance of copyright has been further hollowed out.

Today, we have entered the third stage: the model era. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Midjourney has driven a fundamental transformation in content processing. Content is no longer just “links” or “distributables,” but is absorbed, internalized into the probability weights of models. Your work may only influence a trillionth of a parameter, making it untraceable and unclaimable. When AI can instantly learn and imitate any style, the moat of “originality” is drying up.

This leads to an asymmetric reality. A few “copyright aristocrats,” such as Disney and large news groups, can still contend with AI companies thanks to vast amounts of high-quality data and strong legal teams. The lawsuit by The New York Times against OpenAI is an example. But for the vast majority of ordinary creators, copyright protection has already collapsed. They may have to start learning “Generative Engine Optimization,” or GEO, paying to optimize their content to fit AI’s crawling logic, in order to seize the tiny chance of being “seen and output” by AI.

This trajectory is crystal clear: the core power of copyright has shifted from “controlling reproduction” to “link discovery,” then to “monopoly distribution,” and now has devolved into an unquantifiable “training contribution.” Its deep logic lies in the fact that human attention is the ultimate source of value, and each technological iteration is unbinding attention from original works, enabling more efficient scheduling and aggregation.

When the foundation supporting copyright value—the stable control of attention—is repeatedly stripped away, the entire edifice will naturally collapse. This is a necessary metaphor for the crypto world, especially assets like $BTC and $ETH, which rely on narrative and originality consensus. In the face of AI’s information processing power, any narrative barrier in the digital world can be quickly analyzed and deconstructed.

In the future, truly resilient barriers may only exist in those slow, non-digitizable physical worlds: complex supply chains, deep human trust, irreplaceable offline experiences. In the fast-paced digital realm, including the crypto world, clinging to traditional “copyright” or “narrative” thinking may not be wise. Finding value coordinates that cannot be easily copied by algorithms in this new intelligent ecosystem is the key to survival.

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