The Human Cause — Intellectual Property, AI, and Human Creativity

"If machines become creators and inventors in our stead, will we be able to, as Keynes put it, 'keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself'?"

Copyright and patent law were built on a simple premise: that human beings create and invent, and that the law's task is to support and reward those distinctively human activities. Artificial intelligence challenges that premise at its foundation.

This site gathers research, essays, and public lectures on the most consequential question in intellectual property law today: whether and how IP doctrine should require a genuine human cause behind the works and inventions it protects. The answer has consequences that reach far beyond any legal doctrine — into the future of culture, science, and what it means to be human.

The work here engages both law and philosophy: from the US Constitution's Progress Clause to Aristotle's account of human flourishing, from the Berne Convention to the EU AI Act, from patent inventorship to the nature of machine learning. It is scholarship, but it is also a set of commitments — about what progress means, and for whom.