IP, Data and AI in the digital age – Part 6

There's a distinction between AI-assisted works and AI-generated works.

AI-assisted means a human is involved and the AI is just a tool. Because there is a human author, the work in question is propertised and becomes copyright.

AI-generated means that there is no human author involved. In most countries, because the work is not generated by a human, it does not become copyright.

At the moment, the UK is the one exception. Current UK law provides that “computer-generated works” qualify for copyright (though with a reduced 50-year copyright term, shorter than the life-plus-70-years human works get). The UK government is considering abolishing this provision. ‍

So it looks like AI-generated = no propertisation is going to become the dominant position.

But does any of this make sense? Imagine that a human author writes a poem. At exactly the same time, purely by coincidence, an AI writes a word-for-word identical poem. One is property; the other is not. ‍

The only difference between the poems is the means of production. One is produced by a human. The other is produced by a machine.

But since when do we distinguish, for the purposes of propertisation, between the means of production?

Two main reasons have been advanced for denying propertisation to AI-generated works.

The first is that allowing AI-generated works to be copyright “departs from the core rationale for copyright, which is to encourage and reward human creativity”. As discussed in previous parts of this series, this misunderstands the nature of property and markets. The encouragement and reward (if any) do not come from propertisation, but from the ability to trade the property on the market.

The second is that it gives rise to “unfair competition” against human-created works. This is the Luddite argument. Where technology has reshaped how goods are produced, it has nearly always disadvantaged a small group of producers but provided an advantage (usually a cheaper price) to the much larger group of consumers.

28th July 2026