Brill | Nijhoff's edited volume Harmonizing Intellectual Property Law for a Trans-Atlantic Knowledge Economy—edited by Péter Mezei, Hannibal Travis, and Anett Pogácsás, with a foreword by Maciej Szpunar—includes a chapter by Mauritz Kop, founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology, titled Public Property from the Machine. The chapter confronts the question generative artificial intelligence forces on intellectual property law: who should own what a machine makes when no human authored it.
A new category, not a new right
Kop's answer breaks with the reflex to meet new output with new ownership. He argues that human authorship and inventorship remain the normative basis of copyright and patent law, and that—on the chapter's account—extending those rights to fully AI-generated works would chill innovation, narrow cultural diversity, and crowd the commons. In their place he proposes Res Publicae ex Machina—public property from the machine—a deliberately designed, permission-free public-domain regime for creations and inventions that have crossed the autonomy threshold, the point at which output is produced without meaningful human creative contribution. He frames the move as a Pareto improvement: many gain access, and no legal person loses a right that was ever warranted.
Rooted in the articulated public domain
The proposal develops Kop's earlier AI & Intellectual Property: Towards an Articulated Public Domain, published in the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal in 2020, which argued for designing the public domain deliberately rather than treating it as the leftover of whatever rights fail to attach. The 2024 chapter applies that foundation to machine-generated subject matter under a named regime—so the two are best read as a sequence: the foundational article first, the autonomous-output application second. The same design-first instinct that animates Kop's responsible-innovation work, including the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation, runs through the chapter: shape the rules before the defaults harden.
Why it matters for trans-Atlantic IP
Placing the argument inside a volume on trans-Atlantic harmonization is deliberate. The familiar questions—can an AI be an author, can an AI be an inventor—assume ownership is the only available category. Public Property from the Machine insists that public property is a category too—one the chapter argues is more defensible for output no human authored. For the United States and Europe, the practical question becomes not how to extend private rights to machines but what to agree to leave free. The fuller portrait of the scholar behind the proposal is set out in the Mauritz Kop profile. The chapter is a scholarly proposal rather than a statement of existing law—but it reframes a debate that has too often had only one answer on offer.
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