The growing debate over the future of intellectual property law in the age of AI took a wild turn in the past few days when Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Block, and initially a leading figure at Bluesky, declared he would like to see all IP law eliminated.
“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on X on Friday (April 11).
Elon Musk, owner of X and head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chimed in by saying “I agree.”
Not surprisingly, Dorsey and Musk received pushback on the idea, at a time when voices on both sides of the debate are growing louder.
On one side are IP owners in various cultural industries who have been calling for stricter enforcement of copyright and other IP laws amid the boom in generative AI models, many of which appear to have been trained on copyrighted materials without the owners’ consent.
On the other side are leaders of tech companies working on AI that have found themselves under pressure from lawsuits brought by copyright holders over the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials.
Ed Newton-Rex, a former VP of Audio at Stability AI and now a leading campaigner for the protection of intellectual property, described Dorsey and Musk’s assertion as “tech execs declaring all-out war on creators who don’t want their life’s work pillaged for profit.”
Pushback also came from Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, patent specialist and lawyer who served as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 election.
“Actual IP professional here – NO,” she wrote in response to Dorsey’s tweet. “IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”
To which Dorsey responded: “Creativity is what currently separates us, and the current system is limiting that, and putting the payments disbursement into the hands of gatekeepers who aren’t paying out fairly.”
“Tech execs declaring all-out war on creators who don’t want their life’s work pillaged for profit.”
Ed Newton-Rex
Notably, Dorsey is Chairman of Block, Inc., the company formerly known as Square, which owns music streaming service TIDAL.
Dorsey’s tweet likely doesn’t reflect official TIDAL policy on the issue of IP. The company’s CEO, Jesse Dorogusker, told MBW a few years ago that he views music as being “undervalued and underpriced.”
One can only imagine what the value of music would look like if copyright protections were to disappear altogether. It would not be a stretch to imagine that its value would fall close to zero, along with the value of other commercialized cultural products, and the value of labor carried out by artists and other creators.
Responding to Dorsey, some on social media pointed out that Dorsey’s own businesses have benefited from IP protections.
“Very easy to say after you’ve made billions off your IP,” one commenter wrote.
Dorsey’s tweet comes as some tech companies raise the pressure on lawmakers to grant them unfettered access to copyrighted content at no cost.
In a recent submission to a UK parliamentary committee studying potential reforms to copyright law, Google declared that “training on the open web must be free.”
The UK is looking at reforms to copyright law to boost the competitiveness of UK AI firms. Though no final policies have been set, it’s been reported that the UK government favors a proposal for an “opt-out” regime for AI developers: Those building AI models would be allowed to use copyrighted content without permission by default, unless a copyright owner expressly opts out of having their property used.
Newton-Rex has led the charge against that proposal, organizing a protest by artists that culminated in the release of a “silent album” to reflect artists’ fears that loosening copyright laws could harm or even silence human music.
The heads of the three music majors – Universal Music Group Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge, Sony Music Chair Rob Stringer, and Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl – have also all come out against the UK’s proposed loosening of copyright.
In its own submission to the UK parliamentary committee, OpenAI, maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, called for an exemption to copyright law for text and data mining, which would essentially mean free use of copyrighted content for the training of AI models.
OpenAI was co-founded by Musk, who left the company and is now embroiled in a lawsuit against it, with Musk opposing the company’s shift away from a non-profit business model.
Musk now runs a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot Grok, which is integrated into the X platform.
Some have noted that, as head of DOGE, Musk’s ideas on IP could have considerable influence inside the Trump administration.
OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits in the US alleging that it trained ChatGPT on copyrighted books without authorization. In what some have seen as an ironic twist, the company has been investigating whether the Chinese-made AI chatbot DeepSeek was built using OpenAI’s intellectual property without permission.
OpenAI, along with other AI companies facing copyright lawsuits, such as Anthropic, Suno, and Udio, have argued in US courts that their use of copyrighted material should be granted a “fair use” exemption under US copyright law.
Thus far, no US courts have ruled on whether training generative AI models on copyrighted materials without permission amounts to fair use – although one court recently ruled that the use of copyrighted materials by a non-generative AI algorithm was copyright infringement.Music Business Worldwide
