WIPO DG Daren Tang asks if existing IP framework is ready for the AI age; calls for bold approach to the relationship between AI and IP

Daren Tang, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), has told delegates at this year’s WIPO Global Forum on Intellectual Property (IP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that the IP world needs to “be bold enough to ask whether institutions built for an earlier age are ready for the one now arriving.”

The existing IP framework can trace its origins back to laws passed in Venice in 1474, he observed: “The way that we innovated itself underwent a revolutionary innovation with the birth of IP. In that year, the Republic of Venice adopted what is widely regarded as the world’s first patent statute.”

Today, “we are now approaching another critical juncture in human history – another once in 500 years moment. AI is beginning to change how ideas are created, how discoveries are made, how culture is produced, and perhaps eventually how we understand invention, innovation and creativity.”

Change is coming, and the impact of AI on IP cannot be ignored: but, DG Tang added, “We should not fear that change. But neither should we simply surrender to it. Our responsibility is to shape it. And that requires something more difficult than defending the past or predicting the future. It requires us to decide what we want the future to be.”

In his speech he emphasised that AI has already delivered huge benefits for humanity – but “AI is not simply transforming another industry. It is beginning to transform the processes from which intellectual property itself emerges – imagination, conception, and expression.”

While it can, for example, accelerate the development of new drugs to treat diseases, “a creator can now discover that his or her voice, face or style has been reproduced synthetically at extraordinary fidelity. Content of all types – music, films, videos and others – are being produced and distributed at rates which are overwhelming.”

DG Tang asked delegates to consider a key issue: “ultimately, how do we preserve human agency, dignity and meaning in a world in which some of the attributes we have considered uniquely human increasingly have analogous or even equivalent machine counterparts?”

He suggests that the Forum should explore three core issues:

·       What should the IP system protect and incentivize in the age of AI?

·       How should the IP system itself change?

·       How do we make the economics work?

His belief is that “the question cannot simply be who has the legal power to say no. We must also ask: How can we create workable ways for people to say yes? That means exploring new licensing practices, new remuneration mechanisms, better metadata and rights information, technical solutions for attribution and provenance, and new business relationships between creators, rights holders and AI developers.”

Finally, he concluded:

“It will require us to be bold enough to ask whether institutions built for an earlier age are ready for the one now arriving, and to build a new one with today’s human innovator and creator – the modern inheritors of that ancient human instinct of innovation and creativity – at our centre.”

Photo: WIPO/Berrod