‘AI Challenges The Essence Of The IP System’ – WIPO Nigeria Director

Director, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Oluwatoluloba Moody, has said that Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI is challenging the entire essence of Intellectual Property (IP).

Moody spoke at the wrap-up of a WIPO event that trained 22 SMEs on the importance and use of IP in the growth of their businesses.

IP laws are meant to protect an individual, or a group’s ownership of an idea, design or product, providing them the right to restrict their usage, commercialize it, be acknowledged as its owner.

With AI, which is an open-source information tool/platform, the rule is that whatever one creates completely on the system, cannot be owned but belongs to everyone.

Hence, Moody’s question, “Where does the authorship lie?”

“Generative AI especially, puts us in a situation where we are asking “who really is the owner? Where does authorship lie? Can the system (IP) designed to reward creativity and innovation reward an AI machine? Or does that defeat the entire essence of the IP system?”

While there is no answer yet to the role of AI on IP, given its ongoing evolvement, Moody said it is forcing government and stakeholders to redefine both design by asking at the right intervals, key questions as how stakeholders and authorities in other countries dealing with the everyday issues surrounding IP ownership in relation to AI, and be in the look-out for the next uniform standard approach that can deployed to address the challenge.”

On issue concerning multi-layered IP ownership over a product/idea/concept pulling, he said, it is all about layered ownership, and knowing where one right ends, and the other begins.

“There are different forms of IP, different layers of IP. Sometimes, the right of one person ends where the other begins. Sometimes we might see broad overlaps. But it also doesn’t mean that one starts and the other one stops. Rather they are all working together.

“Take the fact that you buy a material from the market. You leverage on that fabric by doing another layer of production to it to come up with a new set of designs. With that, you have also created something that deserves to be acknowledged.

“It is about recognizing the different rights, and seeing how those rights interact, which is just part of what IP story is about,” he averred.