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WHAT DO EFFORTS TO REGULATE THE INTERNET TEACH US ABOUT EFFORTS TO REGULATE AI aka Artificial Intellegence?
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YOU
FLES HA
ICOMI FRO
THE
JOHN PERRY
BARLOW
LIBRARY
A DECLARATION OF
THE
INDEPENDENCE OF
CYBERSPACE
A Declaration of the
Independence of
Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
DECRYPTING THE
PUZZLE PALACE
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants
A NOT TERRIBLY
BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER
FOUNDATION
of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new
home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the
past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us.
A PLAIN TEXT ON
CRYPTO POLICY
You have no sovereignty where we gather.
A PRETTY BAD
PROBLEM
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to
ACROSS THE
ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER
have one, so I address you with no greater authority
than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I
BARLOW IN
ROCKSPACE
declare the global social space we are building to be
BARLOW, DENNING
ON THE CLIPPER
CHIP SCHEME
naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to
BEING IN
NOTHINGNESS
you possess any methods of enforcement we have true
impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do
reason to fear.
COMPLETE ACM
COLUMNS
COLLECTION
Governments derive their just powers from the consent
CRIME AND
PUZZLEMENT
of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received
CYNTHIA HORNER’S
EULOGY
ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do
you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within
GO PLACIDLY
AMIDST THE NOISE
AND HASTE
your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as
though it were a public construction project. You
IS THERE A THERE
IN CYBERSPACE?
cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through
J. KREILSBERGBARLOW
INTERVIEW
our collective actions.
JACK IN, YOUNG
PIONEER!
You have not engaged in our great and gathering
JACKBOOTS ON
THE INFOBAHN:
CLIPPING THE
WINGS OF
FREEDOM
conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our
JUST SAY YES
more order than could be obtained by any of your
LEAVING THE
PHYSICAL WORLD
impositions.
marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics,
or the unwritten codes that already provide our society
MITCH KAPOR &
JOHN BARLOW
INTERVIEW
You claim there are problems among us that you need
to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our
PASSING THE BUCK
ON PORN
precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where
SELLING WINE
WITHOUT BOTTLES:
THE ECONOMY OF
MIND ON THE
GLOBAL NET
there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will
SONGS FOR THE
DEAD
arise according to the conditions of our world, not
identify them and address them by our means. We are
forming our own Social Contract. This governance will
yours. Our world is different.
STOPPING THE
INFORMATION
RAILROAD
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and
TV, LSD, AND LIFE
IN THE COUNTRY
thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web
THE ECONOMY OF
IDEAS (WIRED
MAGAZINE)
of our communications. Ours is a world that is both
everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
THE PURSUIT OF
EMPTINESS: WHY
AMERICANS HAVE
NEVER BEEN A
HAPPY BUNCH
We are creating a world that all may enter without
privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic
THE VIEW FROM
THE BROOKLYN
BRIDGE
power, military force, or station of birth.
THINKING LOCALLY,
ACTING GLOBALLY
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may
express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular,
THROUGH MANY
PANES OF
SHATTERED GLASS
without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
TO BE AT LIBERTY
VERBUM MAGAZINE
INTERVIEW
WHO HOLDS THE
KEYS?
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity,
movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all
based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot
obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from
ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal,
our governance will emerge. Our identities may be
distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only
law that all our constituent cultures would generally
recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to
build our particular solutions on that basis. But we
cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to
impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the
Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your
own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson,
Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis.
These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are
natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.
Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies
with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly
to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments
and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the
angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global
conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that
chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and
the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of
liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of
Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a
small time, but they will not work in a world that will
soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would
perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America
and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself
throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to
be another industrial product, no more noble than pig
iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may
create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no
cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer
requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place
us in the same position as those previous lovers of
freedom and self-determination who had to reject the
authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must
declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty,
even as we continue to consent to your rule over our
bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so
that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.
May it be more humane and fair than the world your
governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
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University of Chicago Law School
Chicago Unbound
Journal Articles
Faculty Scholarship
1996
Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse
Frank H. Easterbrook
Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles
Part of the Law Commons
Recommended Citation
Frank H. Easterbrook, “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” 1996 University of Chicago Legal Forum
207 (1996).
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more
information, please contact [email protected].
Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse
Frank H. Easterbrookt
When he was dean of this law school, Gerhard Casper was
proud that the University of Chicago did not offer a course in
“The Law of the Horse.” He did not mean by this that Illinois
specializes in grain rather than livestock. His point, rather, was
that “Law and . . . ” courses should be limited to subjects that
could illuminate the entire law. Instead of offering courses suited
to dilettantes,’ the University of Chicago offered courses in Law
and Economics, and Law and Literature, taught by people who
could be appointed to the world’s top economics and literature
departments-even win the Nobel Prize in economics, as Ronald
Coase has done.
I regret to report that no one at this Symposium is going to
win a Nobel Prize any time soon for advances in computer science. We are at risk of multidisciplinary dilettantism, or, as one
of my mentors called it, the cross-sterilization of ideas. Put
together two fields about which you know little and get the worst
of both worlds. Well, let me be modest. I am at risk of dilettantism, and I suspect that I am not alone. Beliefs lawyers hold
about computers, and predictions they make about new technology, are highly likely to be false. This should make us hesitate to
prescribe legal adaptations for cyberspace. The blind are not good
trailblazers.
Dean Casper’s remark had a second meaning-that the best
way to learn the law applicable to specialized endeavors is to
study general rules. Lots of cases deal with sales of horses;
others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the
licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give
to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect
these strands into a course on “The Law of the Horse” is doomed
to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. Teaching 100
t Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer,
The Law School, The University of Chicago. Copyright rights to this Article are with the
author.
“[Olne finds more than a few courses in law schools entitled ‘Law and _’
in
which the blank is indeed intellectually blank.” Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Retirement of Sheldon Messinger, 80 Cal L Rev 310 (1992).
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percent of the cases on people kicked by horses will not convey
the law of torts very well. Far better for most students-better,
even, for those who plan to go into the horse trade-to take
courses in property, torts, commercial transactions, and the like,
adding to the diet of horse cases a smattering of transactions in
cucumbers, cats, coal, and cribs. Only by putting the law of the
horse in the context of broader rules about commercial endeavors
could one really understand the law about horses.
Now you can see the meaning of my title. When asked to
talk about “Property in Cyberspace,” my immediate reaction was,
“Isn’t this just the law of the horse?” I don’t know much about
cyberspace; what I do know will be outdated in five years (if not
five months!); and my predictions about the direction of change
are worthless, making any effort to tailor the law to the subject
futile. And if I did know something about computer networks, all
I could do in discussing “Property in Cyberspace” would be to
isolate the subject from the rest of the law of intellectual property, making the assessment weaker.
This leads directly to my principal conclusion: Develop a
sound law of intellectual property, then apply it to computer
networks. Problem: we do not know whether many features of
existing law are optimal. Why seventeen years for patents, a
lifetime plus some for copyrights, and forever for trademarks?
Should these rights be strengthened or weakened?2 Why does
copyright have the particular form it does? What sense can one
make of the fuzzball factors for fair use? How can one make
these rights more precise, and therefore facilitate Coasean bargains? Until we have answers to these questions, we cannot issue
prescriptions for applications to computer networks.
Cyberspace reduces the effective cost of copying. This continues a trend that began when Gutenberg invented movable type
and gave rise to political demand for what has become copyright
law. Yet how can we tackle the question whether copying has
become too easy, and therefore should be met by countervailing
changes, when we have not solved the problems posed by
yesterday’s technology? Consider the plain-paper photocopier.
People can run off scholarly articles. To what extent may researchers copy articles from increasingly expensive journals to
create a stockpile for their own future endeavors? This is a
2 See William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, An Economic Analysis of Copyright
Law, 18 J Legal Stud 325 (1989).
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question about fair use; yet the fair-use criteria are so ambulatory that no one can give a general answer.
Just recently the Second Circuit held that copying for research within a for-profit corporation exceeded the bounds of fair
use.3 The panel was divided; another circuit is to the contrary,
and the Supreme Court split 4 to 4 when reviewing that decision.4 Both opinions leave the impression that a dime’s worth of
difference in the facts would alter the outcome. Lack of certainty
in the property right makes protection of intellectual property all
but impossible.
The Copyright Clearance Center barely raises enough money
to cover the costs of its operations. When you copy something
with a CCC slug line at the bottom, which directs you to remit
50¢ per page to a particular account number, do you do it? No,
you don’t, because the extent of the fair-use privilege is so hard
to grasp, and because remitting would be such a bother-do you
tape two quarters to a post card and mail it?
When property rights are poorly specified, it is hard to transact about them, and correspondingly hard to promote the process
of transaction that allocates resources to their highest valued
uses. Instead we see second-best moves. Illustration: the price of
academic journals has gone through the roof. Library subscriptions often exceed $500 per year; for some scientific or medical
journals, the price exceeds $2,000. This high price is an advance
fee for photocopying, and it may be that this way the authors
(and publishers) get total revenues as high as they would collect
if they could charge for reprints, or if they sold more journals at
lower prices.5 The high-price-journal, cheap-copy approach not
only cuts the costs of transactions (no one has to collect or remit
copy fees), but also cuts the marginal cost of using intellectual
property. Because intellectual property can be used without being
used up, the ideal pricing mechanism is a flat fee, with no marginal cost for use.
The blanket license for the right to play music approximates
this ideal two-part price. But the blanket license works because
American Geophysical Union v Texaco, Inc., 60 F3d 913 (2d Cir 1995). See also William Patry, American Geophysical Union v Texaco, Inc.: Copyright and Corporate Photocopying, 61 Brooklyn L Rev 429 (1995).
‘ Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States, 487 F2d 1345 (Ct Cl 1973), affd by an
equally divided Court, 420 US 376 (1975).
‘ See S. J. Liebowitz, Copyright Law, Photocopying,and Price Discrimination,8 Research in Law & Economics 181 (1986).
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the rights for public performance of music are very well specified.
Not so for copying articles.
The high subscription fee for libraries does poorly at one of
the critical ingredients of the blanket license: price discrimination. ASCAP and BMI charge by a radio station’s revenues, or a
licensee’s gross receipts. The University of Chicago pays more for
its ASCAP license than does Swarthmore College. But the Journal of Financial Economics demands the same $750 per year
from Goldman Sachs, a business school, or a law school; it cannot
discriminate as effectively as ASCAP does. So Goldman Sachs
pays too little for the value received, and the University of Chicago Law School has just dropped its subscription. The pricing
mechanism has not worked well, because of the difficulties in
defining the property rights.
If we are so far behind in matching law to a well-understood
technology such as photocopiers-if we have not even managed to
create well-defined property rights so that people can adapt their
own conduct to maximize total wealth-what chance do we have
for a technology such as computers that is mutating faster than
the virus in The Andromeda Strain?
Well, then, what can we do? By and large, nothing. If you
don’t know what is best, let people make their own arrangements.
Next after nothing is: keep doing what you have been doing.
Most behavior in cyberspace is easy to classify under current
property principles. What people freely make available is freely
copyable. When people attach strings, they must be respected,
and the tough question when someone copies commercial software will be whether the person making copies is a direct infringer or only a contributory infringer, and whether the remedy
should be civil damages or time in prison. Lower costs of copying
may make violations of the law more attractive, which suggests
the allocation of additional prosecutorial resources, but movement along a cost continuum does not call for change in legal
substance.
What else is there to do? I offer three themes.
1. Make rules clearer, to promote bargains. “We” don’t know
what is best, but in a Coasean world the affected parties will by
their actions establish what is best.
The federal government’s Working Group on Intellectual
Property Rights recently issued a report called Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. In addition to
the pompous title and the standard drumbeat of calls for more
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studies, this report contains a few concrete proposals. One, which
I gather is controversial, is to amend the Copyright Act to beef
up the distribution right.’ The Working Group recommends that
the law recognize that dissemination of copyrighted works via
electronic transmission is one of the rights the copyright proprietor possesses.
One may say in response that this change gives too much to
the copyright proprietor or restricts unduly the ability to disseminate works. Some people believe that copyright proprietors
should be delighted to have a throng willing to transmit their
works to consumers who will pay royalties for them (as a recipient clearly must do–for they get a copy whether or not a transmission is a “distribution” of the work). Perhaps so; but if this is
so, the author or owner will permit the transmission, just as *song
writers license the transmission of their works over the radio to
people who may choose to turn on their tape recorders. An author
could give this permission at large, while retaining the right to
charge for the keeping of copies.
Simply put, it is awfully hard to know what the optimal
compensation package for authors is, unless the property rights
are clear. If something about the nature of cyberspace has made
application of the distribution right cloudy, then by all means
clear it up again, so that people may make their own arrangements. And on balance it is best to give these rights to authors.
Why? Because if the best arrangement turns out to be free distribution, then private transactions may produce this result when
the statute assigns the rights to authors; but if the best arrangement turns out to be some fee for distribution and a lower price
for copying, it is extremely hard to reach this state of affairs if
the statute cancels the distribution right. Private transactions
could shift the right back to authors only if the parties have
contractual relations (for example, patrons of the opera may
agree not to tape the performances). We must bear in mind the
high possibility of error in the original specification of
entitlements-a risk especially high in a legislative world dominated by interest-group politics. (The copy law contains a special
provision for agricultural fairs and exhibitions, still another allusion to the law of the horse!) The risk of error should lead to
initial assignments that are easy to reverse, so that people may
find their own way with the least interference.
Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, Intellectual Property and the
National Information Infrastructure193 (1995) (“Working Group Report”).
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2. Create property rights, where now there are none-again
to make bargains possible.
Property rights in domain names is an example of what I
have in mind. Until recently, domain names on the Internet were
assigned by the government (rather, by a firm under contract to
do the government’s bidding). Allocation was first-come, firstserved, with no effort to purge unused names. That led to people
storing up domain names. Intellectual-property law rightly has
been hostile to such maneuvers. Domain names have some of the
attributes of trademarks; but one can’t get a trademark by just
filing. A firm must use a mark to obtain rights in it; must use the
mark continuously; and once this occurs, latecomers stand behind
it in line. Similarly, corporate names are registered with the
states, and new arrivals cannot duplicate existing names.
The allocation of domain names is now in private hands, and
the $50 annual fee will abate the snatch-and-grab incentive to a
limited degree. But the allocation of names remains first-come,
first-served, with the result that people lay claims to famous
corporate and political names. Today you can point your browser
to www.clinton96.org and find, not the home page for the Clinton
reelection campaign, but a satire of that campaign, with a big
picture of the President holding up one finger and a caption
claiming that he has a single accomplishment–election. Dick
Tuck has come to cyberspace. This is nonpartisan harassment:
www.dole96.org also is a satire page.
Property rights need to be better specified than that. Appropriation of names and trademarks would not be tolerated in the
rest of the commercial or political world; why so for Internet
addresses? In other words, we need to bring the Internet into the
world of property law. I grant that, with search facilities, you can
find the American Broadcasting Corporation even if someone else
has www.abc.com. Nodes are in the end numbers, and conversion
to letters is arbitrary. But the search process is costly and can be
avoided by correct allocation in the first place.
By “correct” allocation I certainly do not mean allocation
according to some government formula. We have tried that approach with broadcast licenses, and it has failed. Indeed, even in
the world of over-the-air communications, the Federal Communications Commission has moved in the direction Ronald Coase and
Leo Herzel pointed in the 1950s: sell frequencies at auctions.7 So
R.H. Coase, The Federal Communications Commission, 2 J L & Econ 1 (1950);
Comment, Leo Herzel, ‘Public Interest” and the Market in Color Television Regulation, 18
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it can be with domain names. Let people bid for symbols, then
sell them in a developed aftermarket. Perhaps initial allocations
could be made by corporate names or product trademarks. Details are far less important than the principle that it is important
to establish property rights, without which welfare-increasing
bargains cannot occur.
That the Internet spans the world means some difficulty in
defining property rights in names; many jurisdictions may have
different ideas about optimal allocations. But the telephone system spans many legal regimes without duplication of numbers.
International disagreements about patent or copyright laws are
much more complex than those necessary to establish domain
names.
Some other nations are jittery about the fact that no one
owns or runs the Internet; it is a web of little, autonomous nets.
But no one can regulate the whole process of information exchange, and even those who hate the idea of free communication
have little choice but to join on the terms the participants are
willing to accept. China must follow the international consensus
if it wants access to other nodes.
3. Create bargaining institutions.
Computers offer many opportunities to do, at next to no cost,
the sort of thing the Copyright Clearance Center has tried and
failed to do for photocopies. Consider, for example, the question
whether a publisher of content on the Internet wants to authorize the making of copies and, if so, the making of copies that can
be recopied, or a single copy for use on a local computer. Or does
the publisher only want to authorize viewing on screen? All are
logical possibilities, each rational for some authors, or for any
given author at different times. How is it possible to specify.
which is which, and to collect payment?-especially in a world
where Netscape Navigator is making cache copies behind
everyone’s back and turning all of you into persistent infringers!
The answer, it seems to me, is a convention-a protocol under which each file contains its own instructions on this question,
and programs know how to interpret them. You are familiar with
such conventions. When your modem calls a remote modem, the
two devices engage in elaborate interrogation to discover what
speed to use and what compression and error-correction algorithms are in place. An international standards-setting organization agreed on the language; private firms all over the world
U Chi L Rev 802 (1951).
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have decided whether, and to what extent, to use this agreed
language for communications. Some firms have come up with
their own extensions, outside the organization’s framework. Encryption technology is similar. You may notice that when
Netscape enters a particular corner of the web, a solid key appears in the lower left of the screen; this shows that the client
and the server have agreed on an encryption protocol, securing
the session.
There are several available protocols.’ So can it be with
copying. A standards-setting organization could prescribe, say,
twenty different copying rules-sets of permission and payment
terms. There could be competing organizations, with their own
standards. Each Internet server and client would understand
these terms and carry out the negotiation automatically, remitting any payment to an agreed depository by secure methods.
In raising this possibility, I have in mind still a third meaning of the Law of the Horse. Gerhard Casper did not originate
that phrase. It comes from Karl Llewellyn. When he was beginning the project that led to the Uniform Commercial Code, he
contrasted the rules for trade between merchants with the rules
for idiosyncratic transactions between amateurs, which he called
the law of the horse Why hitch professionals to a wagon designed for amateurs? Llewellyn’s idea, realized in the UCC, was
to give merchants a menu of options from which they could
choose at low cost. One option would be the presumptive rule,
applied unless the merchants said otherwise.
The Working Group expresses some concern that courts
would balk at enforcing such “contracts of adhesion,”‘ ° but recent cases show that the concern is unjustified.” There is no
reason to distinguish contract terms from any other aspect of a
product’s composition. A buyer of a computer does not control the
quality of the circuits; the seller arranges both product attributes
and contract terms. Just as no one would think of saying that the
buyer of a computer with a 500 MB disk really is “entitled” to a
The process can be automatic and secure. Netscape’s security methods are simple
compared with those used at MIT, which, despite the greatest concentration of bright
hackers on the planet, has never had a security breach. See Jeffrey I. Schiller, Secure Distributed Computing, 271 Scientific American 66 (Nov 1994).
‘ Karl N. Llewellyn, Across Sales on Horseback, 52 Harv L Rev 725, 735, 737 (1939);
Karl N. Llewellyn, The FirstStruggle to Unhorse Sales, 52 Harv L Rev 873 (1939).
o See, for example, Working Group Report at 49-50 (cited in note 6).
See, for example, Vimar Seguros Y Reaseguros, S.A. v M/V Sky Reefer, 115 S Ct
2322 (1995); Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v Shute, 499 US 585 (1991).
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CYBERSPACE AND THE LAW OF THE HORSE
215
750 MB disk, or a faster disk, on the ground that disk size and
speed is a “contract of adhesion,” so it is foolish to complain
about contract terms. These all are mediated by price. “Better”
terms (as buyers see things) support higher prices, and sellers
have as much reason to offer the terms consumers prefer (that is,
the terms that consumers find cost-justified) as to offer any other
ingredient of their products. It is essential to enforce these terms
if markets are to work.
Repeated transactions in thick markets. That’s what copying
is on computer networks. Just as computers lower the cost of
copying, so they expand the size and thickness of the market,
and lower the cost of transacting in intellectual property, for both
negotiation and payment can be done automatically once authors
and users decide what terms they will accept. People tend to
emphasize the effect on copying costs and disregard the effects on
the size of the market and the costs of transactions; yet just as
lower costs of copying pose a challenge to authors, the lower costs
of transacting may represent the solution. Computers now match
all trades on the London Stock Exchange; they can match trades
in a virtual intellectual-property auction place. Work is under
way to revise Article 2 of the UCC to supply more standard, offthe-rack rules for computer software. 12 I trust that the authors
will resist the temptation to limit the range of allowable choices,
rather than to write a menu containing the most popular morsels. The plan can be extended to intellectual property, either by
listing options in the statute or through a private standardssetting effort.
To make this work, the author’s instructions about dissemination and payment must remain with the copy. The Working
Group recommends a new statute to prevent tampering with
copyright protection and management systems.”3 This proposal
may or may not be right in the details, but it is not clear to me
that any change is necessary. Excising any part of the intellectual property likely creates a derivative work, which itself is a subject of control under current law. This is not the time or place to
get into details, however.
A quick summary: Error in legislation is common, and never
more so than when the technology is galloping forward. Let us
not struggle to match an imperfect legal system to an evolving
world that we understand poorly. Let us instead do what is es-
12
See Working Group Report at 53 (cited in note 6).
” Id at 212-213 (analysis), App I 5-12 (draft legislation).
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sential to permit the participants in this evolving world to make
their own decisions. That means three things: make rules clear;
create property rights where now there are none; and facilitate
the formation of bargaining institutions. Then let the world of
cyberspace evolve as it will, and enjoy the benefits.
HeinOnline — 1996 U. Chi. Legal F. 216 1996
WIPO/IP/AI/2/GE/20/1 REV.
ORIGINAL: ENGLISH
DATE: MAY 21, 2020
WIPO CONVERSATION ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP) AND
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
Second Session
REVISED ISSUES PAPER ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY AND
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
prepared by the WIPO Secretariat
INTRODUCTION
1.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a general-purpose technology with widespread
applications throughout the economy and society. It is already having, and is likely to have
increasingly in the future, a significant impact on the creation, production and distribution of
economic and cultural goods and services. As such, AI intersects with intellectual property (IP)
policy at a number of different points, since one of the main aims of IP policy is to stimulate
innovation and creativity in the economic and cultural systems.
2.
As policy makers start to decipher the wide-ranging impacts of AI, the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) has started to engage on the aspects of AI that are specific to IP.
There are several threads to this engagement, notably:
(a) AI in IP Administration. AI applications are being increasingly deployed in the
administration of applications for IP protection. WIPO Translate and WIPO Brand Image
Search, which use AI-based applications for automated translation and image recognition,
are two examples of such AI applications. Several IP O
