By: Dominic Rochon, Xiang Zhang
Innovation and technology conversations are almost always oriented toward what comes next, what lies ahead, what will disrupt, or what will transform. Intellectual property law sits at the centre of these forward-looking debates, shaping how innovation is protected, disrupted, and governed. Yet the conversation at the launch of Intellectual Property Futures: Exploring the Global Landscape of IP Law and Policy, hosted recently by IP Osgoode, suggested a more compelling perspective: looking towards IP futures does more than help us anticipate change; it helps us see the present more clearly. Artificial intelligence, digital globalization, and shifting economic models are not only reshaping innovation—they are also illuminating the blind spots embedded within todays IP structures. These blind spots surface in unresolved questions about originality and human authorship, the erosion of local normative priorities within global trade flows, and the largely invisible human labour underlying IP and information technologies.
Graham J. Reynolds, co-editor of the volume, opened the event by emphasizing the importance of emerging scholars in shaping the vitality of IP research. Reynolds, alongside co-editors Alexandra Mogyoros and Teshager W. Dagne, has brought together an impressive collection of 18 chapters by 23 authors who participated in the 2023 Future of the Global IP System workshop hosted at UBC's Allard School of Law. The resulting volume spans five thematic areas: the future of international IP treaties; evolving questions in Canadian law and artificial intelligence (AI); the relationship between Indigenous legal traditions and colonial IP frameworks; the future of IP in a digital and global environment; and the ways in which IP law can both reinforce and mitigate inequality. Together, these themes underscore that IP law is not merely a technical regulatory tool, it is a place where economic priorities, social justice concerns, and cultural values converge. Viewed through a future-oriented lens, each of these domains reveals pressures already reshaping the doctrinal foundations of IP.
Originality, Human Authorship, and the Limits of Existing Doctrine
Innovation debates are oriented toward what comes next, and questions of authorship reveal how unprepared existing doctrines may be. The rapid rise of AI-generated content forces copyright law to confront assumptions long taken for granted: that creativity is human, that authorship is identifiable, and that originality reflects individual intellectual effort. In his presentation, “Protection of AI-Generated Images in Canadian Copyright Law,” Cody Rei-Anderson examined whether such works can satisfy the originality requirement, suggesting that protection may arise only where users provide sufficiently detailed inputs and where AI systems faithfully execute those executions -conditions that are rarely satisfied in practice. Most users do not invest the level of skill and judgment required to craft detailed prompts, and the outputs of AI black box systems often deviate from what the user intended. Dr. Rei-Anderson illustrated this point by referencing models’ tendency to hallucinate when asked to produce precise outputs or maintain specific spatial relationships.
[*The image below is Chat-GPT's output when asked, “What would it look like if I looked outside an acoustic guitar?” The fingerboard, strings, bridge, and saddle are all incorrectly positioned.]
Recognizing the gaps between expressive intention and AI-generated outputs highlights a deeper theme: the originality doctrine may have to adapt as technologies evolve if copyright law is to preserve a normative commitment human intellectual effort.
Viewed through a future-oriented lens, this is not simply a novel doctrinal puzzle. It exposes a present blind spot. When outputs emerge from opaque systems blending prompts, training data, and algorithmic processes, authorship becomes diffuse and originality difficult to anchor. The debate over AI-generated works therefore reveals an existing tension: doctrines built around individual human creativity struggle to accommodate collaborative, machine-mediated forms of production. The future of authorship, in this sense, illuminates the fragility of its present foundations.
Globalization and the Disappearance of Local Normative Priorities
Naama Daniel’s presentation shifted the discussion to the tension between the territorial nature of IP law and private international law (PIL), a dynamic that reveals another blind spot within IP law: the erosion of local normative priorities. Territoriality in IP law, she noted, is not merely technical, rather, it represents a manifestation of a state’s sovereign authority to protect fundamental national policies, including freedom of expression, education, and access to knowledge. These policies reflect deeply embedded social and economic values, and IP law often serves as a vehicle for their expression.
However, territoriality increasingly conflicts with the goals of PIL, which seeks to reduce multi-jurisdictional litigation and improve efficiency across borders. Daniel introduced the concept of “ICE Bias” (Initiative, Choice, and Enforcement) to describe the systemic imbalance between right holders and users in cross-border disputes. Right holders typically initiate proceedings, select favorable forums, and possess stronger incentives to enforce judgments, while users are often limited to seeking declaratory relief.
This imbalance encourages strategic litigation, where rights holders obtain judgments in restrictive jurisdictions and attempt to enforce them globally. Through cases such as Trader Joe’s Co. v. Hallatt and Google Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc., Daniel illustrated how global injunctions risk undermining domestic policy decisions. Her concern reflects a broader question about the future of IP in a globalized environment: how can law remain responsive to local values while operating within transnational networks?
In this manner, globalization does not merely generate efficiency, it risks flattening normative diversity. When enforcement mechanisms privilege scalability and uniformity, local concerns can be overshadowed by global market interests. Daniel proposed the development of specialized IP forums to complement general PIL venues, thereby preserving territorial policy choices while managing cross-border disputes.
Labor Exploitation in AI Training Processes
While AI is often framed as an autonomous technological force, Professor Teshager Dagne redirected attention to the human labor embedded within AI systems, emphasizing that data labeling, preprocessing, and model training depend on workers in economically vulnerable regions whose contributions remail largely invisible within IP frameworks.
Drawing on research conducted in Uganda and Ethiopia, Dagne described environments resembling digital “sweatshops,” where workers labeled data behind laptops rather than operating sewing machines. Although copyright doctrine recognizes human skill and contribution, data-labeling labor often falls outside traditional authorship frameworks. Dagne suggested joint ownership as a potential remedy, but acknowledged doctrinal and practical barriers, particularly where workers have signed away rights. This gap reflects a broader policy deficiency and highlights the need for statutory reform.
Dagne’s intervention emphasizes the socio-economic values embedded within legal systems: IP law does not merely regulate innovation; it shapes the distribution of benefits and burdens. A future-oriented IP perspective highlights that fairness in IP cannot be assessed only at the level of ownership or protection, it must account for the full technological pipeline and the conditions under which knowledge and data are produced.
Seeing the Present Through IP Futures
The launch of Intellectual Property Futures: Exploring the Global Landscape of IP Law and Policy does more than anticipate technological change; it provides an opportunity to identify and critically examine the blind spots embedded within the contemporary IP legal landscape. Looking ahead, in other words, becomes a way of more clearly seeing the problems with the present – and this wide-ranging, open-access collection provides us with an excellent vantage point to do just that.
Xiang Zhang is a doctoral student at Osgoode Hall Law School and a Senior IP Osgoode Research Fellow, with a strong interest in advancing open-source and open access to knowledge.
Dominic Rochon is a 2L J.D. student at Osgoode Hall Law School and an IP Osgoode Research Fellow, with an interest in music, copyright, and user-generated content.
16 April 2026