Josh Weiner
As Washington debates how aggressively to support the AI industry’s growth, Coke Morgan Stewart, president and CEO of the Council for Innovation Promotion and a former deputy under secretary of Commerce for intellectual property, is making the case that intellectual property protections should not become collateral damage in the race to lead on artificial intelligence.
Stewart previously served as deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under the Trump administration, giving her a direct view of how patent and copyright policy gets made, and of how quickly it can shift when a fast-moving technology outpaces the legal framework built to govern it. Her argument now centers on a simple claim: intellectual property law functions as what she calls “the great equalizer” in the economy, the mechanism that lets individual inventors and small companies compete against much larger, better-funded rivals.
That argument is landing in the middle of an active legal fight. Major news organizations, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, are suing OpenAI, alleging the company trained ChatGPT on their published articles without authorization or compensation. OpenAI has defended the practice under the fair use doctrine, and the Department of Justice has filed a brief backing that interpretation, putting federal weight behind the idea that training AI models on copyrighted material can fall within fair use.
Stewart's concern is less about any single lawsuit and more about the precedent an expansive fair use standard would set. In her view, loosening copyright protections to accommodate AI training does not create a level playing field; it mainly benefits companies with the resources to use copyrighted material first and defend the practice in court afterward, while leaving smaller creators and inventors with weaker leverage to negotiate or object.
She frames the stakes in terms broader than any one industry: strong intellectual property protections, she argues, give authors and inventors the ability to turn ideas into assets and assets into competitive businesses. Weaken that chain, and the people with the least legal and financial firepower, individual inventors, authors, and small firms, are the ones who lose the most ground.
To make the point concrete, Stewart points to a lineage of individual inventors whose success depended on enforceable IP rights, from Elias Howe's sewing machine patent and Thomas Edison's inventions to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter copyrights and Aaron Krause's Scrub Daddy sponge, each a case where legal ownership of an idea was what allowed its creator to build a business around it rather than simply watch larger players exploit the concept freely.
Stewart is not arguing against AI development itself. She has said American leadership in AI is important to both economic competitiveness and national security, and her position isn't a call to slow the technology down. Her caution is narrower and more specific: that policymakers eager to clear obstacles for AI companies should be careful not to, in her words, inadvertently undermine the property rights that underpin the broader U.S. economy in the process.
The fight over how fair use applies to AI training is still working its way through the courts, with no resolution yet in the OpenAI cases or the broader policy debate in Washington. Stewart's intervention is a reminder that however that fight resolves, the precedent it sets will reach well beyond AI, shaping how intellectual property is valued and defended across every industry that depends on it.
