Our intellectual property (IP) laws are not a Deep State bureaucratic conspiracy. Patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are all based on the Copyright Clause in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. It’s the only clause in the Constitution that comes with its own justification, and intellectual property protection is one of the few legal regimes that points directly to a specific constitutional provision.
IP protections incentivize creation and innovation because they allow creators at least the possibility of profiting from their creations if they turn out to have any value. Even if the creation has no real market value, IP protects creators from having others steal and take credit for their work.
So, IP incentivizes creators, and thus facilitates the constant production of new innovative products for the general public. But IP creates barriers for freeloaders, thieves and opportunists. There’s always someone out there who thinks they can make better use of your property than you are, or who wants to make money without accounting for all the costs of doing business. Intellectual property protections are barriers to those who wish to gain something based on the property of others without compensation, whether that something is financial or political.
Over the past 20+ years there have been a lot of threats to copyright and patent. Internet piracy, digital piracy, and file-sharing technology all threatened first the music industry and then the movie industry. A campaign by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) blamed patents for high drug costs, failing to recognize that, without patents, the drugs wouldn’t exist in the first place. Public policy should never prioritize the allocation of creative goods at the expense of their creation.
The good news is that policy makers mostly resisted the calls to weaken IP, and thus today we have access to almost unlimited libraries of recorded music and video, at affordable prices. And we have new drugs that are saving and extending lives, curing diseases, and making life more enjoyable.
But sadly, during Donald Trump’s second term, his administration’s policies have repeatedly threatened IP protections, and thus continued innovation.
Consider drug pricing. The Trump Administration’s May 2025 executive order on “most-favored-nation” pricing for prescription drugs insists that Americans pay no more for certain drugs than the lowest price offered by a set of other countries. This policy effectively adopts the price controls of other nations. Government-imposed price ceilings function as a backdoor taking of patent value, and will discourage future risk-taking in pharmaceutical innovation.
Patents are how we finance the expensive, failure-prone work of discovering and improving new therapies. Even Congress’s own research arm notes that legal issues may arise from the policy’s interaction with intellectual property rights—“particularly patents”—because patents play a central role in drug development.
Now turn to copyright & AI. In April 2025, tech billionaires Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk made headlines by calling for the radical dismantling of the intellectual property (IP) system—urging us to “delete all IP.” That’s because large language models (LLMs) are greedy for content to train on and regurgitate. Those investing in AI want to eliminate any friction for their efforts, but IP rights cause friction by design—they make it hard for creators to be trampled.
We’re bullish at IPI on AI, but AI’s potential doesn’t mean it should get a special carve-out from using the property of others without compensation.
In reaction, the U.S. Copyright Office appeared to accelerate release of its “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Report,” which in Part 3 found that AI training typically entails copying protected works and that fair use exceptions, if any, must be assessed with close attention to purpose and—critically—market substitution. The Office also recommended letting licensing markets develop rather than having government impose sweeping “solutions” such as compulsory licensing regimes.
This was early in Trump’s second term, when AI bros had the President’s ear. Next thing you know, President Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on May 8, 2025, and Shira Perlmutter—the Register of Copyrights—was dismissed days later. Multiple reports note that observers and lawmakers linked the timing to the Copyright Office’s AI report, which seems likely if not at least suspicious. Even if motives are debated, politicizing the institutions that administer copyright chills the very stability that property rights require.
Then in President Trump’s July 23, 2025 speech announcing an “AI Action Plan,” the President argued that you “can’t” have a successful AI program if you must pay for “every single article [or] book,” and urged that AI be allowed to use a broad “pool of knowledge” without constant licensing negotiations.
Dismissing copyright because it makes business more complicated may seem to a businessman like a commonsense idea, but what about to the businesses that own that copyright? Should it be official government policy that one industry can steal from another? Is that equality under the law? Obviously whatever access AI has to copyright material has to balance the interests of the copyright owners, through licensing or some other system. The courts are already dealing with these issues and will be for years.
Finally, the spillover risk extends beyond patents and copyrights. Broad “eliminate information silos” directives that mandate “full and prompt access” to information can erode confidence that proprietary business information will be handled with strict need-to-know discipline—exactly the confidence trade secret protection depends on in practice. And workforce edicts that increase patent and trademark pendency at the USPTO weaken brands and inventors by delaying the moment when rights become reliable and enforceable.
America can lead in AI and improve affordability without degrading the rule-of-law foundation of innovation. But that requires a simple, old-fashioned commitment: respect intellectual property as a source of creativity and economic growth, not as a barrier to be overcome.
And beware when certain industries are cozying up to an administration in order to gain advantages over other industries.