Earlier this month, Block CEO Jack Dorsey sparked a torrent of debate after posting “Remove All IP Laws” on Twitter/X. The controversy has led to a rift in perspective towards IP ownership between AI advocates and creators.
Dorsey rejects one user’s claim that IP law protects the work and the works and inventions of small innovators from the ruthless rebirth of incumbents, saying, “Times have changed. One person can build faster. Speed and execution are more important.”
Such arguments apply anywhere outside the open source tech community, and reject normal ownership in favor of unlimited development by participants who build each other’s work. In such an open environment, IP protection and licensing applied to other people’s work are encountered as a fierce pace constraint of AI-driven development.
The incentives to promote open source AI are a disgust for cherishing the creation of media and entertainment, not to mention other industries that rely on the market exclusiveness provided by their ability to own and protect IP. Some have tried to imagine Web3 scenarios for co-creation, but the media doesn’t thrive with open open all-all.
In the media, as one user suggested, it is not possible to achieve serious advances in creative originality by allowing everyone to “relentlessly repetitive” or “instantly remix” each other’s work. Without copyright protection for creative work, anyone can take, copy, manipulate, or remuneration, certain risks of digital platforms, and recently published by Studio Ghibli works being registered in AI models and used to copy a user-generated style of millions, and can be taken, copied, manipulated, or redistributed, even if they are not generally demonstrated.
To be clear, eliminating all IP laws creates a wide range of economic fallouts. Almost every industry, including technology, relies in one way or another on its ability to maintain IP defensively through copyright, patent, or trademark. In the US, achieving is also legally challenging. IP protection is embedded in the constitution and will require constitutional amendments to enable Congress to establish and abolish IP Act.
However, there is a real new risk that governments will weaken copyright protections to weaken copyright protections as leaders and legislators seek to balance IP laws that promote technology development and protect rights. This will more accurately lead to economic fallouts for content creators, artists, writers and media companies.
“These more extreme statements on the utter elimination of IP protection seem to be part of an effort with a more direct goal of weakening IP protection. AI companies provide AI companies with more pathways to use the massive amounts of content created by others without paying for them.”
In lawsuits claiming infringement, AI companies argue for fair use, allowing lawmakers to use copyrighted content without the need for a license. In February, Openai and Google’s comments on the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan called for assertions to use copyrighted work for AI training based on fair use.
Still, it is the Congress, not the administrative bodies, that have the power to change copyright laws. Congress must change copyright laws, such as amending the doctrine of fair use, or pass new laws that grant the right to train AI with data that has been scrapped without a license.
While court decisions can set precedents, individual decisions on litigation do not give AI training a “category path,” a lawyer told VIP+. A court assessing whether the use of copyrighted works by an AI company is fairly used will do so by determining the facts of the case against the four factors used to determine fair use.
However, if AI companies succeed in persuading the government to allow AI training on copyrighted jobs, they don’t need to eliminate all IP laws to harm their creators. Enabling derivative output similar to AI training on works that have been scraped off without consent or compensation has already reduced the economic incentives for creators to produce and distribute their original works to the market.
Dorsey and Open AI CEO Sam Altman each have called on creators in the age of AI to a new economic or monetization model, but in reality they have not actually proposed an alternative incentive structure that will ensure that people and publishers will be able to open their own creative works to the public and gain economic value with IP law.
“You’re effectively talking about the collapse of incentives for people to bring creative work to the public, so if that’s possible, you need to create a different incentive structure that works,” Clarice Law’s Koonse said. “So, what are the alternative incentives for copyright protection that encourage people to create content? Even the content that can be used to train AI, unless people care if they’re going to create the original content anymore?”
