For many, many reasons, I suspect patents will become much more important now. After all, it's the ideas that matter now. Which I maintain, has always been the case, because "execution" is nothing more than a series of smaller ideas, except those typically needed money. How convenient for those with capital!

Patents have the drawback of being expensive and very slow to acquire, but having worked on a bunch, they are uniquely suited to be radically optimized by GenAI.

Also patents are very flawed in practice, but the only real protection that is left. Copyright is meaningless when, as people have done, you can reproduce entire saas products by feeding AI screenshots.

Intellectual Property as a whole has been in need for a revamp for a while now, but it's even more critical in the age of AI.

Perhaps. Even that may not be important if the METR progress line continues much longer, because then all those billion dollars "worth" of software written over the past 3-ish years get re-invented for cents on the dollar.

Separately, I think code is more like an invention than a work of art, and should have been subject only to patent laws instead of (and not in addition to!) copyright laws. This doesn't really make much difference now, as AI doesn't (at least in the UK) have personhood for either copyright or patent law: https://www.briffa.com/blog/can-you-obtain-a-patent-for-inve...

I would assume that the same “substantial human authorship” criterion applies. Copyright is about human creativity, it doesn’t otherwise matter if something is art, prose, typesetting, or code.

It doesn't really matter as long as you keep physical control of the code and don't let others copy it.

Can you imagine the chaos if suddenly all the slop code wasn’t owned by the company? Even though that result would be consistent with this ruling, it undermines the narrative the economy is now riding on, so there will likely be special exemption.