The Dorsey & Musk Battle on IP Law
Jacqui Coombe, LawFuel contributor
When Jack Dorsey, the bearded oracle of Twitter (now X), tweeted “delete all IP law,” and Elon Musk, the world’s most famous meme stock, replied “I agree,” the legal world collectively spit out its coffee.
Was this a joke, a provocation, or the start of a Silicon Valley revolution? For lawyers who spend their days parsing the fine print of copyright and patent filings, the prospect of a world without IP law is about as comforting as a surprise audit from ASIC.
Why the Sudden Outrage Against IP?
It’s not that Dorsey and Musk have suddenly developed a taste for anarchy. The real culprit is artificial intelligence—specifically, the AI models that are currently hoovering up copyrighted works.
These models are trained on everything from classic novels to cat memes, and the question of who gets paid (if anyone) is now a multi-billion-dollar headache.
The tech titans’ beef with IP law is that they see it as a speed bump on the information superhighway.
Dorsey, a long-time open-source evangelist, has made a habit of releasing software into the wild. Musk, never one to let legal niceties get in the way of a good soundbite, once called patents “for the weak” and famously promised not to sue anyone using Tesla’s tech “in good faith”.
Their argument boils down to the fact that IP law, in its current form, is less about protecting the little guy and more about letting incumbents build toll booths on the road to innovation.
Of course, not everyone’s singing “Kumbaya” around the campfire. Writers, artists, and musicians, whose works are being fed to the AIs are understandably miffed.
Lincoln Michel, a writer, called out Dorsey and Musk for hypocrisy, noting that none of their companies would exist without the very IP protections they now want to scrap.
And it’s not just angry tweets. The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, while a group of authors (including Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz) are taking Meta to court for allegedly using their works to train its Llama AI models.
Meta, for its part, is waving the “fair use” flag, arguing that feeding books to an AI is transformative enough to pass legal muster. Whether judges will agree is a question that could keep copyright scholars in billable hours for years.
The Legal Reality Check
IP law is creaking under the weight of new technology, and everyone knows it.
Lawmakers are scrambling to update statutes, while the global patchwork of rules threatens to make AI development as complicated as a cross-border M&A deal.
Some countries, like the UK, are flirting with rules that would let companies use copyrighted works unless the owners explicitly opt out—a move sure to generate more litigation than a misfired NDA.
So, will Dorsey and Musk get their wish? As AI continues to eat the world, the battle over IP law is just getting started. And for lawyers, that means one thing: the billable hours will keep rolling in, even if the tweets keep rolling out.
