Intellectual property

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Not to be confused with confidential information, intellectual property covers copyrights, patents, trade marks, property rights that arise at common law (or under statute ) which can be enforced against all comers, and not simply as as a result of any contract.

For intellectual property rights to arise there needs, as the name suggests, to be some application of someone's intellect to the creation of the information. Not all information is capable of protection: raw data, for example, isn’t.

As a paradigm in crisis

Is AI the problem, or IP?

IP emerged as a way to allocate resources in an analogue age in which it was impractical to extract abstract “intellectual property” from its substrate. One could therefore control IP by controlling replication of the substrate. it wasn’t really a “data” problem.

The information revolution (which started with the Jacquard loom) has changed all that. IP has long struggled with sampling, remixes, digital collaboration and even packet switching (the internet, on several levels, is one collossal transgression/falsification of the idea of copyright). The emergence of AI assistance in content generation is a further degeneration of the IP paradigm. It’s irretrievably broken.

In a digital universe, where you can bifurcate information from substrate, the idea of intellectual property in data is little more than unjustified state-sponsored monopoly enablement. The Rolling Stones wrote Satisfaction in 15, minutes Keith Richards literally while asleep. What justification is there for their exclusive rights to that arrangement of data in (almost) perpetuity?

Ask not how AI fits into the intellectual property rules, therefore, but how we should reimagine the legal framework for the commercial exploitation of data.