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Publication Date

5-7-2026

Document Type

Comment

Abstract

Copyright, as a body of law, is a recent development in the human consciousness, originating in 1710 with England’s Statute of Anne. Nevertheless, in the three hundred years that followed, more copyright laws were enacted than murder statutes throughout recorded history. With these successive statutes, corporations have effectuated the largest land grab ever seen. Modern copyright law is the elephant in the room in discussions of wealth inequality, perpetuating evil inside and between countries. Moreover, it has deprived humanity of cultural roots, locking ideas behind a paywall that funnels wealth to the few and stymies ingenuity through the sterilization of the public domain. This theft of art and culture is the result of successive reforms, funded by skillful corporate lobbying disguised as the protection of artists.

Nevertheless, intellectual property (“IP”) need not have ended up this way, and recent technological developments in artificial intelligence (“A.I.”) have pushed these laws to the breaking point. This system, built on “a kind of schizophrenia” and legal doublespeak presented through forked tongues, has reached its haziest frontier with A.I. This paper does not attempt to resolve issues of A.I. copyright under the present framework because, fundamentally, the present structure “can only be seen as a temporary workaround to a problem that has no solution under current laws.” Instead, by analyzing the historical development of copyright, intentions behind its creation, evils of its present form, and economics of the modern world, this paper proposes two solutions for the necessary reform of the system: first, copyright abolition or, second, a return to the limitations imposed by the first American copyright law.

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