listed at the very top of our source document because there's one that poses an existential question for the future of everything we just discussed oh i know where you're going with this throughout this entire deep dive we've established that copyright relies entirely on human creative expression and originality from the utilitarian courts in the u. s to the soul driven droid autor in europe the law explicitly requires a human author right a human being but as we enter the era of artificial intelligence what happens when an ai generates a masterpiece do the invisible property line belong to the programmer who built the model good question does it belong to the person who typed the prompt or does it belong to absolutely no one immediately dropping into the public domain because there was no human soul behind the expression as the invisible real estate market of the human mind expands into the realm of the machine who gets to own the the new property lines something for you to mull over thanks for joining us on this deep dive

so um if you do this incredible improvised street dance right right in the middle of paris you legally own that choreography the absolute second you finish your last move yours instantly yeah but if you do that exact same dance in new york well you own absolutely nothing unless someone happened to be recording it on their phone which is pretty wild when you think about it it is and welcome to the deep dive you handed us a massive comprehensive source document today a detailed wikipedia article all about copyright yeah we're really getting into the weeds on this one we are you gave us this because you wanted a shortcut to understanding this like invisible legal framework that dictates exactly how human creativity is owned shared and monetized exactly we're talking about a system that affects literally everything in your daily life you know from the books you read in your commute to the uh the memes you share in group chats it's everywhere it really is i kind of think of copyright as the invisible real estate market of the human mind like you can't see the property lines but they are absolutely there oh for sure and they completely determine who gets to build a house who has to pay rent and who gets evicted for trespassing i love that analogy and to carry that real estate analogy further you know intellectual property isn't about owning the abstract concept of dirt right it's about owning a specific surveyed plot of land and the fundamental definition provided in our source material makes this very clear which is copyright does not protect ideas it protects the original expression of an idea in a tangible form okay so meaning what exactly well meaning you cannot own the idea of a talking anthropomorphic mouse oh okay i see where you're going with this right if we allowed people to own broad ideas culture would just um stagnate immediately one person would own the concept of a love story or a mystery that would be a nightmare a total legal nightmare but if you draw a specific talking mouse with red shorts and yellow shoes well you own that exact expression the law protects the unique execution not the underlying premise so the idea is free but the execution is sensed off but to really understand why those fences exist for you today we kind of have to look backward because you can't understand the rules of the game today