Generative AI: News

Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? | The New Yorker

But every right is also a prohibition. My right of ownership of some piece of intellectual property bars everyone else from using that property without my consent. I.P. rights have an economic value but a social cost. Is that cost too high?

I.P. ownership comes in several legal varieties: copyrights, patents, design rights, publicity rights, and trademarks. And it’s everywhere you look. United Parcel Service has a trademark on the shade of brown it paints its delivery trucks. If you paint your delivery trucks the same color, UPS can get a court to make you repaint them. Coca-Cola owns the design rights to the Coke bottle: same deal. Some models of the Apple Watch were taken off the market this past Christmas after the United States International Trade Commission determined that Apple had violated the patent rights of a medical-device firm called Masimo. (A court subsequently paused the ban.)

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Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, find this kind of rent-seeking objectionable. They complain that corporate copyright owners “strut the world stage as the new barons of the twenty-first century,” and they call copyright “the biggest money machine the world has seen.” They point out that, at a time when corporate ownership of copyrights has boomed, the income of authors, apart from a few superstars, has been falling. They think that I.P. law is not a set of rules protecting individual rights so much as a regulatory instrument for business.

But what Bellos and Montagu are ultimately distressed about isn’t that businesses like Sony are sucking in large sums for the right to play music they didn’t create, or that you and I have to pay to listen to it. We always had to pay to listen to it. The problem, as they see it, is that corporate control of cultural capital robs the commons.

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