Angst, Anarchy, and Abstraction: IP Challenges in Times of AI
The story of how a thousand-year-old artwork transcended time, space, and media, revealing how messed up our IP regime really is - and what we can do to change it.
Murnau at the edge of abstraction
In the summer of 1911, everything is about to fall apart. The horror of war is palpable in the air, like a lingering, high pitched sine. Angst is pouring through the cracks of time, and art is its preamble: Arnold Schönberg crushes the rules of harmony with his leap from late-Romanticism to atonality. The premieres of his early string quartets are accompanied by tumultuous scenes, boos and whistles, fistfights. Franz Kafka explores new depths of anxiety, isolation and alienation in literature: man as slave of an omnipresent, ruthless system, a premonition that would bitterly manifest through the industrial-scale slaughter in the battlefields of Verdun just a few years later. And in the unassuming town of Murnau, Germany, a group of avant-garde artists introduce anarchy into fine art.
Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, the undisputed gravitational center of these enfants terribles, experimenting with gender fluidity, liberal values and new perspectives in a time of bigot Wilhelminian authoritarianism, had settled down at the edge of the idyllic pre-Alpine town years before. The surroundings trigger an unprecedented rush of almost manic productivity that culminated in nothing short of a revolution: Sujet by Sujet, brushstroke by brushstroke, the forms in their paintings dissolve, disband and disintegrate; dazzling colors emancipate to create lucid atmospheres; until finally, reality dies, and abstraction is born - a moment of invaluable importance for modern art.
The graveyard of intellectual property
This anarchical rush of creativity that changed modern art for good, does not happen in a vacuum, however. The house of Kandinsky and Münter in the summer of 1911 - by locals soon just referred to as the Münter house - is a wild panopticon of folk art from far and near that the couple feverishly collects: Bavarian reverse glass and votive paintings, medieval woodcuts, Chinese paintings, sculptures from Mexico, Cameroon, and the Easter Islands, Japanese ink drawings, Russian folk prints, ancient reliefs from Greece, and an Egyptian shadow puppet, all scattered across the rooms of the mansion.
These objects are the single most important focal point of inspiration for the artists on their traverse of the path to abstraction: Not only does the group include an abundance of their photographs into the seminal Blue Rider Almanac of 1912, the programmatic manifesto of the group; but, even more importantly, their groundbreaking still live paintings of these years depict countless of these artifacts over and over again.
While the revolution of expressionism is forever tied to names like Kandinsky and Münter, the authorship of most of these artisan works remains in the dark, despite their formative influence on the movement. The Münter house is on the one hand a hub of endless creativity, overflowing abundance of ideas and remixing of art with limitless opportunities; on the other, it’s a sad graveyard of intellectual property, making the expressionists no better than the colonizers centuries before, plundering and exploiting native property for their own good. Funny enough, over a hundred years later, the Münter house is a fitting metaphor for the times we find ourselves in.
Madonna, the bullet-dodging time-traveler
In their defense: It’s too easy to point the finger at Kandinsky and Münter, outlaw the entire Murnau gang of painters, and accuse them of copyright infringement in hundreds of cases. Rather, what we see here is a symptom stemming from a much more serious disease that has simmered in the intellectual property regime since its very beginning: the complex nature of intellectual property, its ghostlike unfathomable character that tends to transcend time, space and media, is more often than not evading the possibilities of accounting for it.
Take the example of the Madonna of Ettal, a wooden figurine Gabriele Münter was immensely drawn to. She made this typical Bavarian artisan work the very centerpiece of two still lifes, which are considered important steps in Münters journey towards abstraction, both created during the idyllic summer of 1911 in Murnau. The peace, quiet and comfort of these years would soon end, however. From the creative epicenter of Murnau, the horrific chaos of war w0uld scatter the once so tightly interwoven group of artists all across Europe, with their members either falling in the bloodshed of Perthes-lès-Hurlus and Verdun (Marc, Macke), cutting off intimate relationships (Kandinsky, Münter), traveling restless across borders (Jawelensky, Werefkin) or driving them into depression (Münter).
The figurine of the Madonna, however, has survived the chaos of two world wars. She outlived every single Blue Rider artist, transcended time and space, and made its way to the Tate Modern in London, where she’s currently displayed next to her still live depiction “Madonna with Poinsettia”. The side-by-side comparison showcases the immense influence of the figurine on the painting beyond just the mere depiction of its form: Münter’s entire color palette revolves around the delicate rosé of Madonna’s gown and rich cobalt of her coat that the artisan of the traditional art piece chose for the figurine. Yet, the former carries the signature of world-famous Münter; Madonna’s sign simply reads: “Devotional Copy of the Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Ettal, Early 19th century, Unknown artist”. One is considered a unique milestone of modern art; the other just a faceless, commoditised piece of carved wood.
The fact that this practice is considered a normality, shows us how accustomed we have grown to an incredibly flawed system of intellectual property, and just how selective the attribution of worthiness to authorship is - and always was. It's exactly like millions of creative content producers, diligent forum commentators, gifted graphic designers, or hustling photographers feel, as their works are thrown into the maw of data-hungry LLMs. Their contributions represent the very foundation that powers the world-changing advent of AI; and yet, their work is being commoditized, devalued and disregarded like a better form of data garbage. And us bystanders, we’re doing nothing differently than the spectators of the Madonna at the Tate Modern: We take a look, nod meaningfully, and move on without making a sound. Franz Marc was right: intellectual goods are indeed valued so completely differently by people than material goods, and that’s a shocking insight.
IP, sent by god, remixed by humans
So what needs to change the status quo of the intellectual property regime is not just a revamp of its model. Sure, we do need a highly reliable and highly available place to document intellectual property ownership as a basis. In the case of the Madonna, if the artisan of the figurine registered their work in some sort of ledger that was available to us today, we could trace the journey of its ownership through Münter’s image, back in time. What we’d find out by just taking one glimpse at the ledger, is that the figurine itself is a remixed IP. It depicts a white marble sculpture at the altar of the Medieval Ettal Abbey, likely created in 133o. We could also expose the legend from the monastery’s founder, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, that the Madonna was given to him by god directly - probably his deus-ex-machina to hide its true ownership. We’d see that the original Madonna was likely created by a sculptor in Pisa some fifty years earlier, in Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance.
Likely, our graph wouldn’t lose its track in Pisa, as it does now - who knows how far back in history we could go? And since the marble sculpture of the Ettal monastery has reportedly been depicted in countless wooden figurines, paper illustrations, pendants or commemorative coins made by visiting pilgrims over the last hundreds of years, our IP graph would likely be a breathtaking, interwoven network spanning across countries, continents and centuries. This network would not just grasp a hold of IP’s unfathomable character; it would show the true beauty of an original idea and the immense creative power of remixing, while attributing every valuable creator along the way.
Automation: Because the artist is not present
Such a network of intellectual property alone would already have a tremendous positive impact on IP creators across the globe, as long as it’s decentralized, highly available and transparent. However, as reproduction techniques gradually shift from physical to digital reproduction, the dynamic changes. What Münter, the anonymous wood carver and the Italian sculptor all had in common, is that they had to master their craft in order to produce a piece of work. The process itself was labor intensive and could often take weeks, months or years. With the advent of AI, however, every single person now has the capability to create their own works of art within seconds, at marginal cost - no craftsmanship needed. In fact, as the example on the right showcases, anyone can take existing art like Münter’s Madonna, and remix their own version of it.
While this democratization of art production in itself is a welcome development, the sheer scale and speed of AI content production necessitates another attribute of a better IP regime: automation. In a time where the creation and remixing of content is suddenly taken over by AI models at breakneck speed in an automated fashion, the attribution of ownership needs to happen programmatically, too. By making IP programmable, the effects of scale are enabled for every single original thought, be it machine- or human-created. Creators could attach license terms to their works in a few clicks, while models in training could programmatically license the data they use. Only by making IP programmable, we can make sure to make original ideas prosper in the age of AI.
Towards a new age of flourishing IP
Having a central ledger of programmable IP is a first good step, but the history of the Madonna shows that we need to do more than just that: We need to build an entirely new culture of ownership, one that puts fairness at the heart of its model. To build this just system, we need to excite people for intellectual property and make registering and sharing original thoughts fun, convenient and transparent for everyone across the globe. We must elevate intellectual property to a first-class citizen, and build awareness of the importance of authorship and attribution while preserving the immense creative power of remixing.
That’s exactly what we at Story Protocol set out to do. We’re not just building a decentralized, reliable and transparent IP graph that makes registering, remixing and tracing intellectual property easy, while extending it with the power of automation; our mission is to make the age of AI and age where - instead of being commoditized and devalued - intellectual property flourishes.