Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked “I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski’s copyrights”, and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.
We’re already there, there’s no need for this hypothetical. We’ve reached the point where we have trademarked plants, and natural cross-pollination with neighbouring fields has led to fines to farmers because they’re technically growing someone else’s intellectual property plant.
Vaccines and drugs whose research is paid for with public funds are copyrighted and poorer nations are forbidden from obtaining them at reasonable prices.
Vanguard technologies like FPGAs are seeing a rise in later years not because the concept is new, but because 40-year-old key patents of the technology started to expire and this allowed third parties to improve on the technology, and increase its availability and affordability.
Time and time again, software and hardware designed and published with open source but licensed copyright (or copyleft) are blatantly copied and modified without permission by big tech, without any credit or compensation to the original author, in complete violation of the license terms, and nothing ever happens because they have better lawyers than the small open source people.
AI models are unlawfully trained illegally with immense amounts of copyrighted material, and then substitute artists with real understanding of the art.
No need to make up hypotheticals for a society in which this already happens