Journal of Intellectual Property (J Intellect Property; JIP)

KCI Indexed
OPEN ACCESS, PEER REVIEWED

pISSN 1975-5945
eISSN 2733-8487
Research Article

Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Reconstruction of Intellectual Property Law: Copyright, Patent, Trademark, Trade Secret, and Governance in the Age of Machine Production

Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria

Correspondence to Dmitry Erokhin (erokhin@iiasa.ac.at)

Volume 21, Number 3, Pages 201-225, September 2026.
Journal of Intellectual Property 2026;21(3):201-225. https://doi.org/10.34122/jip.2026.21.3.201
Received on May 27, 2026, Revised on June 19, 2026, Accepted on September 04, 2026, Published on September 30, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has placed intellectual property (IP) law by affecting the entire chain of creative, technical, and commercial production. Copyright law must determine the extent of human control required to protect AI-assisted work; whether extensive ingestion of protected works for model training constitutes infringement, fair use, text and data-mining, or licensed use; and how courts should evaluate outputs that resemble or compete with existing works. Patent law confronts a related question: how to preserve human inventorship as generative technologies increasingly assist with hypothesis formation, molecular design, code generation, engineering optimization, claim drafting, and experimental planning. Trademark law is also changing, although it has received less attention. In AI-mediated markets, consumers may no longer encounter trademarks through ordinary searches and comparisons. Instead, they may receive ranked answers, conversational recommendations, generated product descriptions, synthetic endorsements, or automated purchase suggestions. Trade secret law has become equally central because model weights, datasets, prompts, safety procedures, filtering methods, benchmarks, and fine-tuning practices are often protected as secrets, even when creators, regulators, courts, and downstream users require additional information to evaluate legal compliance and public risk. This study argues that generative AI should be regulated by reconstructing existing intellectual property principles rather than granting legal personhood to AI systems or creating new, exclusive rights for machine-generated outputs. Human authorship and inventorship should remain the legal baseline. Meanwhile, the law must exercise greater caution regarding the stages at which AI creates legal risks. Training, model development, output generation, and market deployment raise different questions and should not be reduced to a singular debate about AI and IP. This study employs doctrinal, comparative, and policy analyses using materials from the U.S., EU, U.K., and international organizations. It examines recent case law and administrative guidance alongside academic scholarship on authorship, fair use, text and data mining, augmented inventorship, algorithmic trademarks, deepfakes, transparency, and trade secrets. It concludes that the most affective AI era framework is layered and emphasizes human-centered attribution, contextual training approaches, meaningful transparency, sector-sensitive licensing, output-stage accountability, disciplined trade secret protection, and coordination among IP law, competition law, consumer protection, privacy, and AI regulation.
Keywords

generative artificial intelligence, intellectual property, copyright, fair use, text and data mining, authorship, patent inventorship, trademarks, trade secrets, AI transparency, licensing, AI governance

Notes

Conflicts of Interest

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

Funding

The author received manuscript fees for this article from Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.

Section