Rajagopalan argues AI necessitates copyright reform

Economist Shruti Rajagopalan argues that artificial intelligence fundamentally alters the economic rationale for copyright law by drastically reducing the cost of first expression. In a commentary shared on Bluesky, Rajagopalan contends that copyright emerged historically because replication was cheap while original creation remained expensive, a dynamic now inverted by generative AI tools. She asserts that legal frameworks must evolve to reflect this shift in production costs rather than clinging to outdated scarcity-based protections. The argument challenges prevailing industry defenses that treat AI training as analogous to human learning under existing fair use doctrines. This perspective suggests future IP policy should focus on incentivizing quality curation and verification instead of merely protecting initial expression. Legal scholars and tech companies are currently debating whether generative outputs warrant protection or if the ease of AI creation demands entirely new regulatory categories for intellectual property rights.