Intellectual property is a powerful driver of innovation—but it is not the only one. In Beyond IP Innovation Law: The Bigger Picture, posted as a preprint and forthcoming in the European Media, IP & IT Law Review (MR-Int), Mauritz Kop argues that a serious innovation policy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution must reach past exclusive rights toward a fuller toolkit: prizes, grants, antitrust, commons-based production, open innovation, and a vital public domain.
Sustainable innovation law beyond IP
The essay frames "sustainable innovation law" as the interface between creativity, technology, society, and law—combining information law, antitrust, consumer protection, and fundamental rights with AI, machine learning, big data, quantum computing, CRISPR-Cas9, and virtual reality. Its test is normative: innovation counts as sustainable only when it is ethical and social, economically beneficial, conducive to well-being, and supportive of the environment. Once IP loses its monopoly on the policy imagination, a longer menu of incentive mechanisms—competitions, subsidies, tort law, market regulation, R&D tax incentives—comes into view, and choosing among them becomes the real task of the lawmaker.
Why AI can do without IP incentives
Applied to artificial intelligence, the argument is pointed: the classical justifications for IP are weak when applied to AI, and AI "can do without IP incentives," with narrow exceptions such as a medical AI system whose costly clinical trials might warrant patents or, equally, public subsidy. Human authorship and inventorship remain the normative anchor, and machine output that crosses an "autonomy threshold" should fall into the public domain under a model Kop calls Res Publicae ex Machina. The essay also presses for broad text-and-data-mining freedom—even an articulated right to process data for machine learning—so that training datasets, a prerequisite for supervised learning, do not become an IP chokepoint. This complements his theoretical and empirical work on quantum computing and intellectual property law.
A horizontal-vertical innovation architecture
Because incentives and risks vary by sector and by technology, the paper proposes a horizontal-vertical design: horizontal core rules for all 4IR technologies, plus vertical, risk-based regimes organized around a "pyramid of criticality" from low risk at the base to existential risk at the top. The calibration is physics-aware—an open posture may suit AI, while quantum technology warrants more ab initio control given its potential anthropogenic risks, a precautionary tilt Kop develops further in his work on ethics in the quantum age. Written against the European Commission's April 2021 draft AI Regulation, the essay reads that proposal as a "North Star" and urges that safety norms, interoperability standards, and the Trustworthy AI doctrine be embedded directly into the design of technology, monitored through life-cycle impact assessments. The bigger picture, in short, is an innovation law built for purpose—not the reflexive extension of twentieth-century IP.
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