AI Adoption Moves At The Speed of Trust

Award-winning educator and IP advocate Daryl Lim joins Bruce Berman to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and intellectual property education. Broadcasting from Singapore, Daryl shares his global perspective on how AI is reshaping IP frameworks, from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement to the emergence of new data rights. This conversation examines IP leadership challenges, the role of blockchain in patent processes, and why marginalized communities need better access to intellectual property protection. Daryl discusses China's rapid IP development, the importance of equity by design in technology governance, and practical startup IP strategies for navigating an increasingly complex landscape.

Key Takeaways:

• AI and IP rights are fundamentally interconnected and evolving together
• The $1.5 billion Anthropic case settlement sets precedent at $3,000 per book
• IP leadership requires moving ahead of trends, not following them
• China has transformed from IP pirate nation to major player in 20 years
• Blockchain technology can reduce friction in IP transactions
• Universities became IP believers after the Bayh-Dole Act enabled monetization
• Content creators must embrace technology as ally, not enemy
• Government frameworks should align AI development with societal values
• Patent education and copyright training need to be more inclusive
• Small creators need better tools to participate in large-scale licensing

Transcript

[Bruce Berman] (0:00 - 0:41)
Hello, I'm Bruce Berman, the host of Understanding IP Matters, the place where leading innovators and experts share their IP story, the good, the bad, and the outrageous. Daryl Lim is an award-winning educator, author, and IP advocate with global perspective. He is an expert in US and foreign IP and technology competition, including artificial intelligence.

Daryl helps governments, businesses, and creators understand how IP rights are affected by law and technology. Daryl has taught at leading universities in the US, India, China, and South America. Good morning, Daryl.

Thanks for taking the time to be with us. I know it's early for you. Where are you today?

[Daryl Lim] (0:42 - 0:49)
Good morning, Bruce. It is an honor and delight to be back on your program. I am in Singapore.

[Bruce Berman] (0:50 - 0:57)
Okay, good. So you're 12 or 13 hours earlier than we are, correct?

[Daryl Lim] (0:57 - 1:03)
Yeah, but I'll tell you that Friday morning is starting to look pretty beautiful. I think you'll get there soon.

[Bruce Berman] (1:04 - 1:27)
Great, thank you. Let's get right into it. AI challenges businesses on several levels.

There's regulation, especially in California, IP laws which restrict data collection, and the need for massive investment capital to make it AI work. There are also ethics issues. Where is IP today and where do you think it's going?

[Daryl Lim] (1:28 - 1:31)
Well, that's a huge question and a hugely important one.

[Bruce Berman] (1:31 - 1:35)
Did I say where is IP today or did I say where is AI today?

[Daryl Lim] (1:36 - 1:37)
You said IP.

[Bruce Berman] (1:38 - 1:42)
Okay, I meant to say where is AI today and where is it going?

[Daryl Lim] (1:42 - 3:47)
Well, I don't think it's hard to think about AI without thinking about IP and vice versa. I think the future of IP lies in getting the rules of AI right and the rules of AI lie in getting IP right. To some extent, your question alludes to that insight because if you look at how the courts are struggling with foundational issues in copyright protection for books and music, well, it's because the way that AI interacts with the concept of protecting creative works is quite different from how it traditionally has been.

Discreet songs, discreet books, works of authorship in various media doesn't quite gel with the way that algorithms consume and produce those works. I think we are seeing an evolution in that thinking. A couple of blockbuster cases this summer give an early indication of the fact that, well, the way that the law is approaching the consumption of copyrighted works is as long as there's no wholesale production of something that directly competes with that work, there's going to be a tilt towards transformative use and therefore copyright law would allow it as a matter of fair use with an important caveat and that caveat is that the acquisition of those works has to be legal and you see that playing out in the Anthropic case. Even as we speak, the case is going through a hugely important phase of that case management and that's the settlement.

[Bruce Berman] (3:48 - 3:51)
They settled, excuse me, I think it was $1.5 billion.

[Daryl Lim] (3:52 - 3:57)
It is $1.5 billion and the magic figure per book is $3,000.

[Bruce Berman] (3:57 - 4:00)
$3,000 per book for 500,000 books, right?

[Daryl Lim] (4:00 - 4:48)
For 500,000 books. I'm I'm guessing that that's a modest amount for an author but if you compare it to the scale of what an AI developer would face in terms of statutory damages, it's a drop in the ocean and part of the narrative that's going on in that court right now is are there going to be more authors coming out from the woodwork? 500,000 is a large number but that could just be the tip of the iceberg and look at the precedent with all the other cases that are going on in the courts and all the other cases have not yet gone into the courts.

[Bruce Berman] (4:49 - 5:05)
It's something which is huge. Daryl, leadership is a theme that informs your research and your activities. Your podcast, Profiles in Leadership, has been running for four years.

I had the privilege of being a guest. What is IP leadership to you?

[Daryl Lim] (5:06 - 6:06)
Well, IP leadership means by definition that you are ahead and not behind. If you are following trends, if you are there to say, well, the world is fine and let's just go with it, you're not a leader. I think a leader sets the agenda.

The leader understands the ground and carries the ground where he or she needs to and takes different stakeholder groups and sometimes different groups of stakeholders together to where if they thought about it, if they were willing to accept the trade-offs that go with it and the gumption that has to go with it from point A to point B. Unfortunately, could use more IP leadership which is why I think programs like yours are important because they help to spread voices in the IP ecosystem, amplify what they have to say and sometimes inspire that type of leadership. So, thank you for your work.

[Bruce Berman] (6:06 - 6:31)
Thank you. Now, there are many types of IP companies or IP-centric companies but rarely does a C-level or board-level executive step up and defend IP, maybe their own IP but not IP in general. What do you think that is?

It's almost like a negative association with defending IP rights.

[Daryl Lim] (6:32 - 8:24)
Well, I think there are two parts there. First of all, I think not all board members are hesitant about speaking up for IP. It depends on the company that they represent.

I think if they are a company in the pharma industry, for example, their paychecks depend on the value of the IP much more than if they were in some other industries. I think part of it also depends on how IP is supported or not supported in a particular country. I mentioned I'm in Singapore and IP has been recognized for at least the last 20 years to be hugely important and that's thanks in part to the United States leadership at that point in time in rallying different countries together using free trade agreements and having as part of incentives in other areas to say please improve your IP system.

I think the gold standard that was reached in the Singapore-US free trade agreement informed and inspired many other agreements that the United States had with other parts of the world. You saw a global leveling up of IP. I think the high watermark was the comprehensive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The narrative, the story there was that the United States fell out of romance with free trade and pulled out of that agreement while the rest of the world moved on. I think that's a shame because to the question that you were asking earlier, leadership means that you are there and you lead the group and if you are not quite comfortable with where things are, then engagement rather than withdrawal is the proper response.

[Bruce Berman] (8:26 - 8:39)
Darrell, you've been working hard to ensure that AI systems respect human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Please tell us about where do you think we are today and where we need to be.

[Daryl Lim] (8:39 - 10:34)
Well, I think human rights, democracy, and the rule of law are three separate things. Sometimes it's easy to see them as a blended narrative and it's a be-all and end-all of everything. I think the broader theme there is equity.

How do you work in a system that is fair to all groups so that people want to contribute to that system? There is a movement that started in Atlanta, Georgia. You and your listeners may be familiar with it.

The Georgia IP Alliance that eventually became the US IP Alliance that started a global IP alliance and it was started by a gentleman called Scott Frank who was formerly the head of IP for AT&T. He's recently retired, but his idea in that regard is very simple. If IP has value, it's only because it benefits society as a whole.

He articulated that very eloquently with his three pillars and he managed to rally just a remarkable number of people around the world. I think when you think about heady concepts like human rights, the rule of law, the person on the street may not quite understand how that connection is made. But if you talk about jobs, if you talk about encouraging the kind of creativity or inventions that touch their personal lives on a day-to-day basis, then it clicks together.

When you bring together different stakeholder groups in the room, they may not talk to each other, may not like each other, and they're willing to find a common denominator to move forward. I think that's where you move the rule of law, democracy, human rights forward as well.

[Bruce Berman] (10:34 - 10:52)
You have a uniquely global view of IP rights. You travel extensively, especially in Asia, and your view isn't something that many experts have. What would you say are the major similarities and differences in terms of IP rights internationally?

[Daryl Lim] (10:52 - 14:53)
It's an interesting question because it invites us to consider the broader question of where is the world in convergence and divergence in IP today. Actually, if you look at how the political systems of the world have been developing, or perhaps developing in reverse, and how IP has been developing, there's actually inverse relationship in some cases. You would think that they would move together hand in glove, and in many cases I think it has.

But what you see, for example, with the United States is the belief in the value of IP rights has gone down over the last 20 years, whereas in places like China, for example, the belief in IP rights has risen dramatically in the last 20 years. And a co-author, one of a couple of works that I've done together before, Peter Yu, predicted this about 15, 20 years ago by saying, well, if you look at the history of the United States, the United States was a pirate nation when it first was founded, because when you are a net importer of intellectual property, it makes sense as a matter of industrial policy and politics to take that position. But once you are at a fairly mature stage of your country's development technologically, then it makes sense to protect it.

Then you ask yourself, why is the United States then taking a step back in that regard? Does it not want to be a leader? And I think it goes back to the earlier question that you asked, and the answer that I gave, which is do people actually see the value in protecting intellectual property?

And I think that we need to do a better job at making that connection. And to some extent, you see a pushback, a renegotiation of the status quo with Taylor Swift and her re-recording of her master copies. And I think you see a broader request by countries that were not at the table when the concepts of patents and copyrights and trademarks were first established to say, hey, let's also look at traditional knowledge, genetic resources.

Indeed, let's look more broadly at other types of rights like design rights and see how those may be developed and freighted with some of the concepts which you might want to put on a patent right or a trademark right, so that those rights don't have to do all the work. And they were probably not conceived to do all the work when they were introduced sometimes hundreds of years ago, if not thousands of years ago in the case of trademarks. And I think when we are talking about AI, it's the same thing.

We talk a lot about copyright and AI. But actually, if you look at the kaleidoscope of rights that potentially could answer many of the questions that we put on copyright, like the right of publicity, which is in the US a state right, or privacy, which in many cases also is a state right, or sectoral rights, like HIPAA, AI invites us as a collective society to reimagine what kind of new right, maybe a data right, that might be appropriate.

And I'm starting to do some work in that regard, theorising, providing a framework for us to look at where we are in having these different rights and where the gaps are. And then say, perhaps this new right will help answer the question, find a balance, so that as a society, we can move on, as we did over the last many decades. And there's no reason why we should assume, to use the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we have reached the end of history in terms of thinking about how IP can develop.

[Bruce Berman] (14:54 - 15:15)
It's sort of a catalyst that's encouraging us to go further. AI. In an article published early this year, Daryl, in the Duke Law Review, you suggested an equity by design approach to better govern technology and protect marginalised communities, in particular, from potential harm.

What do you mean by equity by design?

[Daryl Lim] (15:16 - 17:45)
The Tech Journal in Duke was a great platform for me to think about, articulate some of the broad themes that we have been discussing so far. So if you think, for example, about how we conceive of patents and copyrights, you think that people have access to the system when they need to, and if they have a good idea, they can get a patent. Or if they have come up with a genre, a song that they want to protect, that's necessarily a linear path in terms of getting rewarded for that spark of creativity.

But more recent work, including by the USIP Alliance and others, have helped us to realise that the politics of intellectual property right doesn't quite gel with the ground truth. And if you are from certain segments of the community, you may structurally be inhibited from getting access to protection. So, for example, studies have shown that many women have been excluded from the patent system, not so much because they're not quite as capable.

Statistically, they're more than half the world. So you would think that there would be at least half of the inventors being women, but actually it's just a small fraction, it's a growing fraction. But if you look, for example, at academia, the way that tenure is awarded, it's not by your publications, but it rewards the early achievers.

And if you look at it professionally, where women are at that stage of their career, many of them are thinking of childcare. They have more domestic concerns and therefore it's hard for them to catch up later on. Similarly, if you think in the copyright space, there's a sense that certain communities, for example, the black community, they have had certain genres of music appropriated, copyrighted, and then enforced against them.

It's a narrative that you also see played out, for example, with traditional knowledge and genetic resources.

[Bruce Berman] (17:46 - 17:57)
It's not just having technical access to the IP system, it's understanding the IP system and how it works, and understanding IP as a business, correct?

[Daryl Lim] (17:58 - 19:09)
More than that. I think the problem is that we have traditionally only seen IP as a business rather than as a tool of, as the Constitution mandates in the United States at least, to advance progressive science and the useful arts. Business is actually not written into there, but we have written it into there because we are a capitalist society.

We think that the way that we do it is through the lens of dollars and cents. But if you think about societal progress more generally to the question that you asked me about the article I wrote, then I think you should look at a more sustainable, broader, more inclusive system. I think it's easy to politicize thinking about what equity and inclusion means in the times that we live in, but actually it benefits everybody.

It doesn't matter whether you're on the right or left, top or global south or global north. It's a leveling up as a whole, and the question is, how do you avoid sectarian politics? How do you avoid playing to the gallery and saying, this is where we should be three years, five years, ten years from now, beyond a particular administration?

Because the history of the war is much longer than an election cycle.

[Bruce Berman] (19:10 - 19:28)
A proactive government framework, as you suggest, has not really worked for IP. I think in the past it has for some, but for relatively few, even for highly developed nations, this doesn't necessarily work. Why should it work for AI and marginalized communities?

[Daryl Lim] (19:29 - 20:15)
Well, I'm not sure it has not worked. I think it generally has worked. Otherwise, you wouldn't see countries around the world adopting it.

People would have all left the world IP organization at this point and just gone their own way. After all, it's a lot cheaper to revert back, in a sense, to the prehistoric age before AI protection. You don't have to think about registries.

You don't have to think about enforcement and so on. But I think there's a general acceptance that IP does work. And even when you think about AI, you've got to think about your hand in glove with IP.

I think the problem is that people are looking at their pot of gold and saying, it's all mine.

[Bruce Berman] (20:15 - 20:21)
A patent is 100% of something, but 99% of the time, that 100% is of nothing.

[Daryl Lim] (20:23 - 20:49)
Well, it's of a lot in the intangible sense. It's nothing that you can hold in your hand. But then licensing means that you have to have an agreement.

Otherwise, it's infringement. You heard of the term. I'm sure you all have heard of efficient infringement.

And I'm sure there are bad actors out there that would prefer just to skulk around and do what they want. And they say, sue me, and then we'll talk.

[Bruce Berman] (20:49 - 20:52)
Three years and $10 million later, we'll talk.

[Daryl Lim] (20:53 - 21:21)
And you see some of that in the AI space as well. But you also see promising signs of licensing on large scales. They tend to be more bespoke licenses.

And that, I think, goes back again to the earlier theme of equity. So if you are a small creator, a small-time author, how would you be able to ride that wave? I don't think that society has provided a satisfactory answer at this point.

[Bruce Berman] (21:22 - 21:33)
It's been suggested that blockchain can play a role in establishing and monitoring patent and other IP agreements between businesses and individuals. What's your take on that, Daryl?

[Daryl Lim] (21:33 - 22:41)
I think there's a lot of promise there, just like with fintech and other aspects. It offers security, immutability. And these are all things that can benefit IP transactions, just like it benefits other types of transactions.

Again, I use the analogy of the iPad. If you go to many senior homes, if you look at many child care centres, these are two groups of people you wouldn't think that necessarily polarise immediately to technology. But because of the way that the iPad was conceived, and now more generically, tablets and touchscreens, it's become much more accessible to different stakeholder groups.

I think it's the same with blockchain and fintech more generally. It's about how do you make it accessible to different stakeholder groups so that you can reduce some of the friction that comes about from having to transfer the access to intellectual property rights.

[Bruce Berman] (22:42 - 22:49)
What needs to happen, in your opinion, in blockchain in order for it to become more universal, to become more adapted?

[Daryl Lim] (22:49 - 23:25)
I think it needs to be invisible. So you and I are speaking, and we don't really think too much about the technology. We don't think about the bits and bytes and the processes that go in behind the scenes.

And because of that, laypeople like us, we interface with it fairly easily. I think we need to reach that same point with blockchain. We don't need to know how blockchain works in a certain way.

We don't need to know how electricity works. It powers it. You need to trust it, right?

And you need to trust it, yes. Adoption moves at the speed of trust.

[Bruce Berman] (23:26 - 23:38)
Well, that's true. That's quite true. You wrote that government frameworks help align AI development with societal values and ethical standards.

What do you mean by that?

[Daryl Lim] (23:38 - 24:58)
So I think there's an aspiration that all governments should try to reach. And what that means is you have a common narrative, a common platform that you bring different constituents in each country together. But I think the answer that each country reaches may be different from other countries, because the history, geography, culture, and circumstances in general of each society is different.

And I think you think about multilateralism, that means that you have a hodgepodge of different perspectives coming together, not because they like each other, but because as was eloquently put at the founding of this country, maybe just before the founding of this country, we either hang together or we hang separately. And I think that's the way it has to be, a recognition that you are not 190 different boats in an ocean, but rather 190 different cabins on the same boat in the ocean. And what you do affects everybody else.

And we were vividly reminded of that with COVID, with climate change, with many of the global challenges, cybersecurity, national security, nuclear proliferation. These are all issues that require the same type of thinking.

[Bruce Berman] (24:59 - 25:40)
You know, this brings us to an area that CIPU and I am quite interested in, models of appropriate IP behavior, IP behavior, not just AI. This includes those associated with patented inventions and copyrighted content. Good behavior on the part of creators, owners, and consumers is not clearly defined.

It feels like most intangible assets are there for the taking. And why don't businesses and universities step up? I mean, obviously, there's a vested interest for them to keep people somewhat in the dark about IP, but there are other issues as well.

[Daryl Lim] (25:41 - 28:20)
I think if you look at universities, universities in the United States didn't always talk about IP. The Bible made a big difference in being able to give them a platform by which they could monetize the basic research that they were doing. And then they became big believers in IP because it was a profitable way of doing business.

I think with businesses too, there is a certain lack of sophistication in understanding how they can level up a business by projecting IP. I would go back to efforts currently underway at the World IP Organization, but in many places like Singapore, for example, you no longer think of the IP office as a registry. USPTO, you think, okay, I register my patents there, I register my trademarks there, and then I'm on my own.

But actually, in many countries outside of the United States, IP registries are innovation agencies, and they work hand-in-glove with other government bodies to think about how you level up the entire IP ecosystem within the country. That means businesses, universities, everything else. To some extent, we have non-profits, as we have in many other areas, carrying that load, but there's only so much that you can do as an unelected representative of nobody.

You need to do more of that. Some of that I've been trying to do, for example, I bring together a group of stakeholders to speak directly to members of Congress and their staff on Capitol Hill. We call it the Innovation Forum on Capitol Hill.

And we have had some success in bridging that gap because these people are not hearing from trade representatives, lobby groups necessarily, but directly from the industries, the stakeholders. The stakeholders are also hearing each other in a closed or invitation-only environment. And there's a level of candor, a certain level of trust that comes about because we are not beholden to anybody's pocket.

Nobody's paying us to do this. For us, we hope that the world will be a better place where there's better understanding and better appreciation of each other's positions. I think similar to what you're trying to do with the name of your podcast.

[Bruce Berman] (28:21 - 28:53)
So IP leadership should be somewhat ilio mercenary. In other words, not just about your needs, your company's needs with regard to IP, but with regard to IP in general. Sometimes the biggest tech companies are frightened by disruptive innovation.

It's not going to reinforce their franchise necessarily, so why should they support that? But if they don't support it, then innovation suffers and other businesses suffer. It's a conundrum, if you will.

[Daryl Lim] (28:54 - 29:32)
Yeah, if you look at how Microsoft approached regulation and intellectual property rights, I think it's instructive. You see a clear shift, and Bill Gates has written about it and spoken about it too, publicly. Initially, regulators, intellectual property, these are things to be managed, kept at bay, and you think about cost minimization.

But after their entanglement, shall we say, with their antitrust problems of the late 90s and early noughts, they have now doubled down on engagement.

[Bruce Berman] (29:33 - 29:34)
They got religion, right?

[Daryl Lim] (29:36 - 31:06)
I don't know if they got religion. They certainly got the fear of God instilled by the Justice Department and the courts. If you talk to Brad Smith, who is really heading the leadership at Microsoft, he is a big believer in intellectual property rights and the rule of law and all of the rest of it that comes with it.

And I think Microsoft is stronger for it, not because they're trying to minimize or manage regulation, but recognizing that intellectual property rights regulation actually can help level up the company. Because to the important word that we touched on earlier, it helps to build trust. Because if you have a company or a belief system that in some ways is above the law, then what is to have somebody else from arbitrarily saying that I'm now stronger than you and I declare what the rules of the road are.

I think there has to be a certain robustness and resilience to the rule of law as a common denominator for everybody to move ahead, especially during points of disagreement. And I think IP at each iteration of its existence has to come back to this fundamental question of what actually does the balance look like in AI and beyond AI.

[Bruce Berman] (31:06 - 31:28)
Some in Washington, Darrell, and elsewhere say that AI should be allowed to develop like the internet, untethered, with few restrictions. Overregulation, they argue, can be a greater harm than no regulation and prevent the U.S. from continuing to lead and compete. You can't govern what you don't know, it's been said.

What's your thinking about that?

[Daryl Lim] (31:28 - 32:26)
Well, I think they're reinterpreting the history of the internet. The internet in many ways was the Wild West, but to use a phrase coined by a legal scholar about the law of the horse, you know, when we move from horses to cars, we didn't suddenly move from a situation where there were a lot of laws to no laws. What we did was we looked at how existing laws could be adapted to new laws.

Sometimes it went too far ahead and we had to scale it back. Sometimes it was lagging too far behind it to catch up. But the laws were there and eventually when you think, even as, for example, about Section 230 issues, intermediary liability issues, there is some law there.

It may not be as stringent as some people would like. Could we do better? Yes.

But I think we do have a system and we should continue to refine that system.

[Bruce Berman] (32:26 - 32:31)
And Section 230, for those who are uninformed, Darryl?

[Daryl Lim] (32:32 - 32:36)
Essentially gives a safe harbour for intermediary...

[Bruce Berman] (32:36 - 32:46)
Facebook is not responsible for the content it carries. It's just like the power company. They just carry the current.

[Daryl Lim] (32:46 - 33:22)
You see, that's part of the narrative. It's not like they get out a jail-free card, but actually there are certain requirements that you need to satisfy to nudge them towards some level of policing without having the peers completely grind to a halt. A similar debate is now taking place in the AI space as to how do you have these massive AI companies offering systems, offering the infrastructure that many apps now run on, to act in a responsible way without things grinding to a halt?

[Bruce Berman] (33:22 - 33:55)
We would be remiss if we didn't touch upon China. And, you know, it's come such a long way in 30 years in terms of IP issuing and protecting companies' IP rights in China and respecting the rights of other nations. It's come a long way.

It still is not perfect, but it still has a long way to go. What do you think can become an international IP nation? Do you think it can become an international IP nation on a par with the U.S.? They still have a little bit to go or very far to go. What's your thinking?

[Daryl Lim] (33:55 - 37:11)
If you look at certain matrices, they're already ahead of the U.S. I think in terms of the activity in the patent space, activity in the trademark space, you can quibble about the quality of patents, for example, but they have a massive cottage industry supported by state money or state-owned enterprises that pegs performances of the leadership, the political leadership at the provincial level, at the county level, at the city level, to how many patents you produce, for example.

And there's a huge buy-in in that, because they are a society that likes numbers and it gives them a common denominator to work with. But they have also seen the prosperity that IP brings to many Western countries. In terms of how they interface with the United States and that level of development, I think you see a politicization of the narrative, in a sense, framing as a zero-sum game.

If they are number one, it means that we are zero. And I think that's the view of a hegemon that thinks that the rest of the world, or China in this case, would act like the United States of the United States if China were number one. I think that's a very narrow view of how people can behave under similar circumstances.

If you look at the history of China, 3,000 years, some say it goes back 5,000 years, they are a war nation. They like to build walls around themselves to keep people out. You see that vividly with the Great Wall of China, but you also see that with the Great Fire War of China, and more recently the Great Covid War of China.

And they use trade as a tool of industrial policy to say, well, if you are good to us, we will open our markets to you, and we'll trade with you. If you're not, we'll tighten the taps on your pineapple imports, your beef imports, your wine imports. And they see themselves as having been shut off the system for about 150 years, unfairly.

But now they want their time in the sun. But what does that time in the sun look like? I think that's something that they have to try to navigate and convince the world that their emergence, in particular in the IP spaces that we're talking about, that is benign.

And they can be as big-hearted in many ways like the United States and bring the rest of the world along. Whether the rest of the world believes that, I think it will depend on how they interact at the micro level, but also at the macro level. And I think that requires some give and take on both sides.

Unfortunately, we don't quite see as much of that as we need to.

[Bruce Berman] (37:12 - 37:25)
Yeah, there's a question of whether how IP can function as legal rights and business assets under a state communism. It's a different calculus there.

[Daryl Lim] (37:25 - 37:30)
Remember that they are not a communist country in the same way that the Soviet Union was communist.

[Bruce Berman] (37:30 - 37:31)
No, no, of course not.

[Daryl Lim] (37:31 - 37:39)
It's a socialist economy with Chinese characteristics, and in many ways, more capitalistic than even the United States.

[Bruce Berman] (37:40 - 38:08)
It's a different culture. Darrell, you've talked mostly about patents, quite interestingly, thank you. But you're concerned about the future of content creators, too.

What do they need to survive, both independent content creators, artists and poets, etc., writers, and also the content creators' motion picture industry and the recording industry? They have to survive as well.

[Daryl Lim] (38:08 - 42:33)
I would say that they need to realize that technology is an ally and not an enemy. For many stakeholder groups, it's easy to view the strange new world that they live in as one that you should put back in the bottle. But once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back.

So what are you going to do? It's a tsunami. It's not just a little shower that you can say, well, let's just close our eyes, stay under the shelter and it'll blow over.

I think the world will be divided into those people that have embraced the technology and those that have not, and those that embrace the technology are the ones that will get ahead. Disney, for example, if you want to talk about the AI space, in Moana, a movie that was recently in the theater's live-action version, Dwayne Johnson was asked to come back and Disney was trying to figure out whether or not he could get his stuntman, who was a relative, to stand in for him, use AI-generated imagery so that he looks like him, the movie star. And you don't have to have the movie star wait around for shoots, reshoots.

It brings down the cost of production, gets the movies out much more quickly. But fundamental questions of whether or not AI-generated creative works can be considered creative enough for copyright protection are unresolved, and therefore they decided after 18 months of punting on it, saying, no, no, we better not go because our entire stable of works could be at risk if we move in that direction. On the other hand, they spent, I think, $1.5 billion buying a stake in Epic, the producer of Fortnite, and much of their IP assets you see now in the form of playable characters. You could talk to Darth Vader, for example, for hours, and he's fed by, powered by AI. So I think there's certain exploratory efforts there, but a huge tension as to how do we navigate this system. And I think if you are a court or member of Congress and you are listening to this, recognize that businesses need stable regimes because at the end of the day, unstable laws means higher risk.

It means that they don't take the risk that they need in order to adopt the technology. And the answer to that in both the copyright space and in the patent space is make that threshold a low one. Get as many people across that starting line as possible.

They are in the race, the ones that run fastest, best, they win the prize. But if you are making the threshold so high that you don't know whether you get protection at all in the first place, then people are going to look abroad because capital is fluid, and they're going to see which other countries are more forgiving and more encouraging of their protection. And the answer is actually not many Western countries.

And there's history to that, because especially in Europe, it's tied to a certain deocentric view of creation. I am doing this as a representative, as a reflection of God's creation. And therefore, that human element needs to be there, and it needs to be clearly defined.

But actually, the human delta is not quite so easy to pin down, and it has never been really a real part of the equation in the modern age. If you think about taking a picture with your smartphone, for example, nobody thinks about what is your human input in taking that picture. You press a button, you get copyright over the photo.

You have a million pictures, people taking photographs of the sunrise, a million people have a million copyrights. Now, how much is your copyright worth? It depends on what you do with it.

And that, I think, has got to be the way when we think about how creatives interface with technology and the law.

[Bruce Berman] (42:34 - 42:58)
That's again, that's 100% of something. But what is that 100%? You know, if it's not worth anything, if it's in the Arctic, that land is not so valuable.

If it's in Manhattan, it's very valuable. So it's context. It's really, context is very important.

We're running short on time. So a couple of quick and final questions. I believe, Darrell, you grew up in Singapore, did you not?

[Daryl Lim] (42:59 - 43:02)
I did. I left about 20 years ago.

[Bruce Berman] (43:03 - 43:06)
Okay, you came to study in the US, I think at Stanford.

[Daryl Lim] (43:07 - 43:10)
Yes, I was there, at the heart of Silicon Valley.

[Bruce Berman] (43:11 - 43:15)
What was your first encounter with IP rights, with IP in general?

[Daryl Lim] (43:15 - 44:21)
Well, actually, it was much earlier than that. I grew up in Singapore, as you said, at that point in time, there was a huge transition of, if you think about Singapore today, it's a leader in many ways in IP protection. But that wasn't necessarily the case when I was growing up.

It was like the United States, a pirate nation. In some areas, you could walk into a shopping mall and you would have the latest movies and music and you would get 300 songs on a CD. I hope your listeners know what that is these days.

You could go to a museum and you could see it there. But in 10, maybe if you want to be generous, give it 20 years, it's undergone a sea change. And I think it shows what's possible.

It shows the value of different stakeholder groups coming together, believing that you could work on an equitable, inclusive IP system that moves society forward and build that trust in order for that to happen.

[Bruce Berman] (44:21 - 44:28)
But what was your first exposure to IP? When did you first become aware of IP and was it positive or negative?

[Daryl Lim] (44:29 - 44:30)
As a legal concept?

[Bruce Berman] (44:31 - 44:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Growing up or whenever, what interested you about IP?

[Daryl Lim] (44:37 - 44:53)
Oh, well, I've always been interested in the science and the creative arts and it's a natural extension of that. You get to talk to people from all over the world and you become a denominator to talk about. That's hugely fascinating.

[Bruce Berman] (44:54 - 45:14)
Yeah, it's interesting to identify and capture creativity and understand it and be able to discuss it even is so challenging, legally or otherwise. Two thoughts you'd love to leave or like to leave with the Understanding IP Matters audience. If I remember two things, what should that be from this conversation?

[Daryl Lim] (45:15 - 46:32)
First of all, if you want to understand IP, continue tuning in to future episodes of this program because you bring great people and you have such wonderful questions, Bruce. It's an art, it's a skill. I think you probably don't get enough credit for it, but I hope that people will appreciate it, amplify it and continue.

You continue to do this long may it endure. The second, I think, is I encourage people to think more broadly about IP. IP is a complicated issue and that raises wicked problems, but these are fundamental issues because they affect our lives, our daily lives, and therefore you cannot not be engaged with it because it's going to affect you regardless.

It's better that you get engaged with the issues, understand the issues in some cases, if you are in a position to help shape the issues and do it in a way that is a bit big-hearted, broad-minded, inclusive, not in a political leftist way or rightist way, but in a way that you think makes sense to bring society forward as a whole and there'll be differences, but how do you manage those differences respectfully? How do you look long term?

I think that will help to define the next chapter of how IP will look like.

[Bruce Berman] (46:33 - 46:49)
Terrific. Thank you so much, Daryl. I know it's difficult for you.

You're traveling and the hours are odd, but you came through for us and I appreciate that, and our listeners do. And we're going to have to have you back on again. We can't not have you on again.

You have so much to say.

[Daryl Lim] (46:49 - 46:53)
Oh, that's very kind of you. I'm always happy to help. Thank you for having me today.