The impact of AI on designs law
Trevor M. Cook · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022
This chapter seeks to challenge the assumption that just because we have become used to treating design protection as a separate field of intellectual property law in its own right, such understanding must necessarily inform how we address the impact of AI on designs. Instead, this chapter proposes that we should recognize the contradictions inherent in treating designs law as an independent area of law when in reality it is a hybrid with features of both patents and copyright, the roots of which lie in copyright but which came by accident to attract features of patent law, and address the issue of AI-generated designs accordingly. The impact of AI also presents us with an opportunity to rethink why we protect designs in this separate way (or in practice in a wide variety of separate ways) and, if we must do so, how best we should go about this.