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.