Former Trump official: intellectual property is the ‘great equalizer’

Coke Morgan Stewart is president and CEO of the Council for Innovation Promotion and the former deputy under secretary of Commerce for intellectual property and deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Several high-profile publications, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and most recently, USA Today, have sued OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The papers allege that OpenAI used their articles to train its models in ways that violate copyright protections.

OpenAI argues that it doesn’t need to license the articles for training because of the “fair use” doctrine, a legal principle that allows firms and individuals to use copyrighted material without permission in limited circumstances. The U.S. Department of Justice just filed a brief in support of OpenAI’s expansive interpretation of the fair use doctrine.

Ensuring that OpenAI and other American labs continue to lead the world in developing artificial intelligence — or “super intelligence,” as President Trump recently rechristened it — is critical to our economic and national security. But it’s equally important that federal officials, both at the DOJ and other agencies, and members of Congress, don’t inadvertently undermine the property rights that underpin the U.S. economy.

Copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property protections give authors, inventors, and small companies an incentive to innovate and a way to compete against big companies and wealthy elites who would otherwise take their good ideas without compensation. In other words, they’re the “great equalizer” of the U.S. economy — they level the playing field between small innovators and powerful corporations, giving anyone with a good idea a chance to succeed.

If we want to keep new products flowing and ensure that entrepreneurs can grow their businesses and create jobs, we need to understand and preserve intellectual property protections.

For most of human history, people had no conception that ideas could be treated as property. Even........

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