This chapter delves into the complex legal questions surrounding AI-generated content and intellectual property rights. Because copyright and patent law primarily focus on human authorship and inventorship, the emergence of AI raises questions about the extent to which AI systems can be considered creators. The chapter explores the possibility of AI-generated works receiving copyright or patent protection and the challenges in determining authorship and originality in the context of AI. Additionally, the chapter examines the potential impact of AI on trademark and trade secret law. It discusses whether AI systems can own or hold intellectual property rights, as well as the implications for businesses and individuals who rely on AI-generated content.

This chapter draws all the threads together, highlighting the profound impact that artificial intelligence is likely to have on the landscape of intellectual property. It summarizes the core arguments of the book and sets out the author’s proposed strategies for adapting intellectual property law to the age of AI. By embracing these approaches, the chapter argues, one can ensure that intellectual property law continues to protect human creativity and innovation in the digital age.

This chapter considers how AI threatens to diminish the value proposition of IP rights, focusing specifically on trademarks and copyright. It discusses how the intangible nature of these rights relies on a shared societal understanding and belief in their existence and value. AI, however, has the potential to undermine this shared understanding, leading to a decrease in the perceived value of IP. The chapter argues that AI challenges the traditional function of trademarks as indicators of source and quality. As AI-generated content proliferates online, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between authentic and artificial sources, eroding consumer trust and confidence in trademarks. This erosion is exacerbated by AI’s ability to manipulate language and imagery, creating a world where consumers may no longer be able to rely on trademarks as reliable signals of origin or quality. Similarly, AI may challenge the value proposition of copyright by blurring the lines between human and machine creativity. As AI-generated works become more sophisticated and indistinguishable from human-created works, it becomes difficult to assess the originality and authorship of creative content, potentially diminishing the value of copyright protection.

Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

Focusing solely on the musical output of composer Igor Stravinsky, this chapter explores the evolution of what would become a characteristic compositional process – so-called ‘block form’ – in later works including Concertino, Symphony in Three Movements and Introitus T. S. Eliot in Memoriam. Close analysis of scores for these works, as well as a 1943 revision of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ from The Rite, shows how Stravinsky crafted an idiomatic compositional technique that could produce both textural variation and structure coherence, while, in some cases, supporting a musical narrative.

This introduction offers a brief account of Clare’s biography, drawing attention to some of the major events in his life, and some of the aspects of his life and his work which have most interested critics. It goes on to offer an extended close reading of one of Clare’s poems, in order to demonstrate the ways in which Clare is able to write within convention, but also to develop a unique poetic voice. By examining his engagement with the aesthetic discourse of the picturesque as exemplary, it argues for his particular capacity both to reflect and to enable reflection upon Romantic-period issues and debates, and also for the originality of Clare’s posture and verse.

This chapter describes how copyright evolved from a right in books, to a right in ’original works’. The chapter considers whether ’works’ are things (the ’metaphysical question’).

Oxford classicist, lover of Renaissance art, Pater might seem to belong in a different atmospheric universe from that which presided over the emergence of intertextual theory in the Paris of the 1960s. While his name is virtually synonymous with subjective aesthetic response, the notion of intertextuality, first named and honed at the hands of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, is, by contrast, tightly intertwined with the idea of authorial impersonality. Yet these realms and modes of thought are not as dichotomous as they may initially appear, however starkly distinct their critical languages. Over the decades since his death, Pater’s work has given rise to considerable comment regarding his use of source material. This chapter examines Pater’s practice of ‘second-hand’ writing in ‘Style’ – in particular his borrowings from Flaubert and Maupassant – in the light of intertextual theory in comparison with the extreme citational practices of Flaubert and Joyce. Highlighting significant similarities and differences between their treatment of sources, it brings into focus the specificity of Pater’s drive to style the second-hand.

The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.

Chapter 4 explores Kant’s theory of genius. The chapter avoids the well-discussed question about whether or why Kant denied that scientific activity requires or displays genius. It instead asks whether, in Kant’s view, genius can produce original nonsense. Is taste a component of genius, or does taste impose constraints on genius as if from the outside? The chapter maintains that Kant takes up two distinct conceptions of genius, the thin and the thick. Both conceptions can be found in Kant’s early thoughts about genius. When the two notions are retained in the third Critique, it creates internal tensions.

Neuroscientific studies of the creative process reveal that artistic ingenuity is not the black box the law supposes it to be. These studies explode several popular myths about art and artists—myths that courts have used to justify their failure to truly interrogate creativity. The courts tend to believe in the creativity of novices, romanticizing the artistic potential of children and the mentally ill. Instead, the science reveals a strong correlation between expertise, learned skills, and creative output. Western societies assume that creativity arrives in a flash of insight, often when the artist is not even thinking about the project at hand; the truth is that creative breakthroughs take sustained effort and motivation. Rather than being incapable of outside understanding, various aspects of creative thought—including the generation of new visual imagery—can now be identified via changes in brain chemistry. The chapter uses copyright cases concerning a variety of works—from fine art to photography to Barbie dolls—to illustrate the flawed ways in which courts try to discern artistic creativity and how they might be reconceptualized in light of neuroscientific discoveries.

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.

Creativity, an apex of consciousness, contains the altered states of a creative trance that are treasured across cultures and time. Ranging from the creativity of everyday life to the reveries that inspire works of science and art to the fast-moving action of sports that shape and reshape personal goals, the creative trance can also be a transcendent experience, an ecstasy using the body’s own pharmacology. There are multiple depths of a creative trance, from light enjoyable flow states to deep experiences obliterating all external stimuli. The degree of depth can correlate with the psychological capacity for absorption. The creative trance relates to the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Openness, Big-C and little-c creativity, Wallas’ four-stage creative process, and Barron’s concept of a habitually creative person. The creative trance can be a pivot to personal transformation, creating new work and a new view of the world, and may also bring the capacity for transcendence.

This extended analysis of The Penelopiad, an alternative “herstory” to Homer’s Odyssey, and Hag-Seed, a radical rewriting of The Tempest staged in a Canadian men’s prison, deals with Atwood’s revisionary practices as she redeploys classic texts for her own purposes. Referencing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this discussion foregrounds these texts as Atwood’s most sustained adaptation projects, exploring how such revisions involve authorial decisions around purpose, fidelity, commentary, appropriation, and autonomy. Discussion of The Penelopiad centers on Atwood’s reflections on the nature of myth in its contemporary interpretations and on her feminist politics of narrative representation, while Hag-Seed offers a different revisionary perspective with its emphasis on the figure of the author-artist-magician, personified in the theatre director, Prospero’s double. Crossing genre boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow, Atwood exploits the appeal of popular genres while retaining the resonance of literary fiction.