Father's property

An old web series depicts a story in which an engineer builds an app that uses AI to create music by mixing and matching tunes already available on the internet. When the musicians sue the app's creator for copyright infringement, the engineer gets the musicians to admit that even their music was created using classical ragas, which have existed for centuries. The ethical question that this story focused on - who is the real owner of intellectual property?

In 4:1 of Gita, Krishn declares that he gave the knowledge of yog, synthesis, to the sun, who then passed it to Ikshvaku King, who passed it through to humans. In a sense, everything that we know, everything that we have learnt, or created or inherited is passed on to us by the universe.

There is no such thing as invention; it is just a discovery of possibilities that already exist in the universe. Those people who do these discoveries have been fortunately put in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills and resources, which enabled them to make those discoveries.


We are entering a tumultuous phase in our evolution, where the machines and AI that we create will be instrumental in eliminating the utility of the very same people who created them. This will lead to the rapid erosion of the value of intellectual property as AI writes software code, runs physical machines, infiltrates defence systems and even surpasses human capabilities in fine arts such as music, art and architecture. It may lead to the democratisation of intellectual property, making it universally available and accessible to everyone, in just the way its distribution was intended.