Intellectual Property Is Dead. AI Killed It.
Ideas to take with you.
- 01
Roughly 85 to 90 percent of the value in developed equity markets is intangibles — patents, brands, licensed ideas — meaning most retirements sit on the assumption that ideas can be owned.
- 02
AI training runs demonstrate that IP enforcement is selective by size: large holders litigate or cut deals, while the long tail of contributors receive no compensation and never will.
- 03
Information wants to flow; scarcity around ideas is engineered, not natural, which is why enforcement grows more absurd as the technology to freely remix accelerates.
- 04
Under a Bitcoin standard, the durable core of what IP tried to capture — reputation, brand, standing among people you've served — remains, while the artificial ring-fence around outputs falls away.
- 05
Centralization cannot outrun a decentralized frontier of people acting; watermarks, license regimes, and distillation defenses lose to the diffuse human capacity to synthesize and remix.
