X's ex product head posted a tweet earlier saying:
I’m no longer sure what “intellectual property” means when intellect becomes free. – source
I thought about this for maybe 5-9 secs before scrolling because it just seemed like another way to asking "what happens when intelligence becomes cheap" but I failed to recognize, at that point, that this was a niched-down case, hence worth exploring.
But I don't necessarily want to offer any clear opinion on what intellectual property means, it's been pretty evident in recent years that we needed to revisit and re-evaluate what it means to own something and how we ensure that there's a system around the concept that actually, without a fault, protects the rights to ownership.
The only practical means to achieve this was already built but has sadly mostly been seen as a casino of many 21 year olds.
So let's not bring crypto assets and blockchain into this, let's just talk about AI.
Nikita's tweet wasn't the only interesting thing I came across recently. I also came across posts about the reengineering and open-sourcing of several popular software.
Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download. – source
Congratulations, Adobe and Microsoft is now FREE!
Now, I think, it should be pretty clear why I began this post by quoting Nikita.
How do you fight something like this and if you cannot fight it, that's essentially a clear path to everything being free or at least, extremely CHEAP.
We're going to see more and more free alternatives to various products and services and many will be literal clones of existing ones.