IP, Data and AI in the digital age – Part 9

The previous parts of this series illustrated why the present rules of intellectual property don't work for a digital economy, the two main reasons being:

• different types of property are given different durations (physical property – perpetual; copyright – life of the author plus 70 years; a database – 15 years in the UK and the EU). Physical property gets the longest duration (by far) even though it is rivalrous and intellectual property is non-rivalrous.

• to become property, intellectual works are subject to a merit-based test, whereas physical objects are not.

These rules represent legacy thinking. Historically, a lot of IP was based on specified individuals being granted certain privileges: if you're going to get a privilege that puts you in a better place than everybody else, there has to be some justification.

The other reason was that intellectual property was rare, and the belief that its rarity justified special treatment.

But is intellectual property a privilege? If I create an IP work, shouldn’t I own it by right? After all, I’m the one who did the work. That doesn’t sound like a privilege to me.

As to rarity, there's nothing rare about IP any more. On the contrary, unlike physical property (the creation of which is relatively difficult), the creation of intellectual property is easy and commonplace. For example, the current number of emails sent every year is 132 trillion; for Instagram posts it is 215 billion; for TikTok posts it is 12.4 billion.

Imagine that 10% of those emails qualify as copyright works: that’s 13.2 trillion new copyright works every year.

15th September 2026