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Copyright isn’t dead. But in an AI saturated world, it is looking increasingly unfit for purpose. How do creative businesses and creators protect themselves?

For centuries copyright has been the main shield for creative work, but its foundation is expression, not ideas.

That made sense when copying left a physical "fingerprint" or brushstroke that connects a work to its creator. Today, however, AI can mimic a style, tone or aesthetic without lifting any identifiable portion of a work: it leaves no trail of the hand. 

In this world, the classic tests of copyright infringement (access, copying, substantial part) become almost impossible to prove.

This is not something that is going to be fixed quickly (or at all) by legislators or courts. The evidential problems are structural. As AI systems become more sophisticated, proving traditional copyright infringement is only going to get harder.  If copyright is harder to prove at the edges, creators need rights that are clearer, faster, and less dependent on forensic similarity.

The rise of the badge of origin

Against this backdrop, registered trade marks and registered designs are becoming increasingly important: when there is no physical trace to follow, we must rely on the symbol of origin to tell us where we are. We are moving from the ownership of the object to the sovereignty of the source.

Trade mark and design rights protect identity and appearance, not creative expression. That difference matters.

A registered trade mark gives you a certificate. Either the sign was used, or it wasn’t. There’s no debate about how much of your “expression” has been taken. The same is true of registered designs, which protect the visual appearance of products (shape, lines, contours, texture, ornamentation).

These are rights that are clearer to prove, faster to enforce, and better aligned with how consumers distinguish real from fake: in a world full of convincing lookalikes, consumers rely on badges of origin (names, logos and recognisable design cues) to work out what is genuine.  

What this means in practice

The point is not that copyright no longer matters. It still does, particularly where there is clear, verbatim copying. But relying on copyright alone is increasingly risky.

A more resilient approach is to focus and build on the rights that are more straightforward to prove and enforce, as protection is moving away from the individual work and towards the source behind it.

Brands should:

• Be consistent in their identity and how it is used, so that misuse is easier to spot and challenge.
• Have a clearly communicated identity and ethos.
• Register trade marks for names, brands, aliases and other key identifiers.
• Register designs for important visual features such as packaging, product shapes or interface elements.
• Protect their commercial ecosystem, by ensuring licensing terms prohibit AI training and redistribution.  Maintain walled gardens where there is no benefit in disclosing assets.
• Keep evidence of originals, timestamps, drafts, proofs of creation and human involvement.
• Monitor use of their identity, including through use of monitoring tools to look for trade mark use in AI prompts and outputs, not just verbatim copies of their works.

The big picture

AI is turning styles into settings that anyone can replicate. When that happens, the most valuable asset is no longer the work in isolation, but the identity that stands behind it.

Brands will survive not because they can prove copying, but because they can prove who they are.

In the next phase of IP strategy, the rights that scale best with the internet and with AI are likely to matter most. For many businesses and creators, that means putting registered trade marks and designs at the centre of their protection strategy and treating copyright as one tool amongst several, rather than the whole answer.

Practical takeaway: invest in the identifiers people recognise—names, logos, and distinctive design—because that’s what scales in an AI saturated marketplace.