Who Owns the Knowledge? Copyright, GenAI, and the Future of Academic Publishing

The paper operates within the paradigm of intellectual property and scholarly communication, which is governed by established copyright laws, licensing frameworks like Creative Commons, and academic norms of attribution. This paradigm is being challenged by the anomaly of generative AI (GenAI), which uses vast amounts of copyrighted academic work for training, creating fundamental conflicts that the existing rules cannot resolve.

This paper is classified as Model Crisis because it extensively documents the failure of the existing copyright and academic publishing paradigm to accommodate the rise of GenAI. The author highlights profound anomalies, such as contradictory judicial rulings on fair use for AI training, the inadequacy of current licensing models, and fragmented international regulatory approaches. By demonstrating that the fundamental rules governing intellectual property and scholarly attribution are breaking down and creating a "regulatory vacuum," the paper portrays a field in a state of crisis, where the established framework is no longer a sufficient guide for practice and new rules are urgently needed.