Jack Dorsey Says 'Abolish All Intellectual Property Laws' and Elon Musk Agrees


by TED Conference

In recent years, there have been growing concerns about AI development companies crawling websites and using copyrighted content to train AI , leading to lawsuits by companies and creators. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey , a businessman and co-founder of Twitter (now X), caused controversy by posting on X that he wanted to 'repeal all intellectual property laws.'



Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk would like to 'delete all IP law' | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/13/jack-dorsey-and-elon-musk-would-like-to-delete-all-ip-law/

Intellectual Property in the Age of AI - by Mike Brock
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/intellectual-property-in-the-age

Dorsey's April 12, 2025 post calling for the repeal of all intellectual property laws drew a variety of responses from many people. Elon Musk, owner of X and Tesla, responded to this by saying, 'I agree.'



Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer and entrepreneur, replied, 'As an intellectual property expert, I say no. Intellectual property law is the only thing that distinguishes human creations from AI creations. If you want to reform it, let's talk!' Dorsey countered, 'What separates us today is creativity, and the current system limits it and leaves the distribution of payments to unfair gatekeepers.'



Ed Newton Rex, CEO of Fair Trained, a nonprofit that certifies AI training practices that respect creators' rights, posted a screenshot of the exchange between Dorsey and Musk, saying, 'Tech company executives have declared all-out war on creators who don't want their life's work to be plundered for profit.' In a reply to the post, Dorsey said, 'There are far better models for paying creators. The current model takes too much from creators and only serves the pursuit of profit.' In response to some of the responses, Dorsey claims there is some better model for giving back to creators, but he has not explained what that model is.



TechCrunch, a technology media outlet, pointed out that 'It's unclear what exactly led to these comments, but they come at a time when a number of AI development companies, including OpenAI (which Musk founded, competes with, and is challenging in court ), are facing numerous lawsuits alleging that they infringed copyrights to train models. ' They speculated that this was a response to recent issues surrounding AI development and copyright.

'In a pre-Trump America, the exchange between Dorsey and Musk might have been dismissed as mere Silicon Valley provocation. But now that Musk is embedded in the administration through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) , such casual fantasies carry weight that demands consideration,' former technology executive Mike Block wrote in a blog post, calling Dorsey's call worthy of scrutiny.

Block, who has worked in the technology industry, is a supporter of open source software and Creative Commons approaches and has seen how these models foster innovation and collaboration. However, these approaches are only effective when they work within the framework of intellectual property rights rather than against it, and they rely on creators being able to choose whether or not to share their rights under certain conditions. He warns that without a legal framework that recognizes the unique value of human creativity, people's creative work will become infinitely reproducible material, and we will enter a world with no inherent value or protection.

Block's particular issue is that Dorsey presents a false dichotomy between maintaining our current flawed intellectual property laws or abolishing them in favor of a vague future in which creators are fairly compensated through an unspecified 'better model.'' If creators don't own their intellectual property rights in some way, it's impossible for them to lobby platforms to compensate them.

'What we are witnessing is not a brave gesture towards creative freedom, but the final stages of a project to transform human creativity into a resource to be harvested, processed and monetized by technological systems,' Block said.

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