A creative future does not have to be a zero-sum game; we can achieve a win-win situation.

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Innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time.

— Mike Rowe, “Dirty Jobs”

The debate over copyright and AI is currently at a boiling point. In just a few weeks, generative AI companies have faced a wave of high-profile lawsuits involving Anthropic and Reddit, Stability AI and Getty, and Midjourney and Disney. This is just the beginning.

Key Points

• The copyright crisis in AI is fully erupting, as companies face lawsuits for training on unauthorized content scraped from the internet, leading to escalating disputes.

• The core issue? There is currently no reliable way to track ownership or usage rights of content. As a result, creators are left out, receiving no compensation and lacking protection, becoming victims in the AI data gold rush.

• Blockchain offers a real solution—it can provide tamper-proof intellectual property records, automatic royalty payments, and verifiable rights management, all without sacrificing privacy.

• It is time to shift from “AI against creators” to “AI collaborating with creators,” using blockchain to build a fair, transparent, and sustainable creator economy.

The simultaneous emergence of these cases is no coincidence. They point to a systemic flaw that runs through the AI boom: today’s AI models are built on a vast amount of intellectual property (IP) that is neither authorized nor compensated.

So far, many AI companies have adopted a “steal first, litigate later” strategy. Their systems build machines by scraping and mining internet content without disclosing how they operate. While tech companies can afford protracted legal battles, the real losses are borne by independent creators. If this status quo is not changed, the future will be filled with lawsuits, ultimately stifling creativity and innovation.

Blockchain as a Solution to the AI x IP Problem

Every lawsuit we currently see boils down to the same issue: there is no tamper-proof record to clarify who owns what content and who has authorized its use. Midjourney CEO David Holz, who is involved in Hollywood's first IP lawsuit against Disney, defended Midjourney's data collection methods in a 2022 interview with Forbes:

“This is just a massive collection from the internet. We use published open datasets and train based on those datasets,” Holz said. “It’s actually impossible to get a hundred million images and know where they came from. It would be really cool if there was metadata embedded in the images about the copyright holder or other information. But that’s just not possible; there’s no registration system right now.”

Holz's perspective is misguided. Blockchain can serve as the public registration system that today’s internet lacks. Here’s how it can help resolve the AI and intellectual property (IP) dilemma:

Tamper-Proof Proof of Ownership

Creators can register their intellectual property on the blockchain, creating a timestamped and tamper-proof record of ownership. Each image, song, or piece of text can be hashed on the chain, recording its copyright information and licensing terms. This means that the creators of intellectual property and their authorized rights will be permanently recorded, and no one can change or retroactively modify it.

Decentralization and Anti-Censorship

A blockchain-based registration system is not controlled by any single company. For example, if all content licenses are stored in a database run by a large tech company like Google or Meta, that company could change the rules at any time or even shut down the entire system. In contrast, a public blockchain is distributed across thousands of nodes, ensuring that no single entity can censor or alter the records.

Real-Time Royalty Payments via Smart Contracts

Blockchain supports smart contracts—self-executing agreements written in code. We can use smart contracts to ensure that creators are automatically compensated in real-time when their works are used. For instance, an AI training dataset can be programmed via smart contracts to send a micropayment to a creator’s wallet every time an AI model calls upon that creator’s image. There’s no need for intermediaries to take a cut, nor for quarterly royalty statements—just automated, transparent payments. Even a few cents in micropayments can accumulate over millions of training instances, allowing creators to earn income at internet speed.

Built-In Source Traceability and Trackability

Since every transaction or usage can be recorded on the blockchain, source traceability becomes a core feature. The record of an image can show its origin, every authorization or rights transfer, and even any derivative works or AI-generated works based on it. In practical terms, this means AI companies can verify whether they have the rights to use certain content via the blockchain before incorporating it into training. If someone attempts to use content without authorization, discrepancies will be easier to detect.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Selective Disclosure

One major challenge of licensing is how to verify rights without exposing content misuse. Zero-knowledge proofs allow creators to prove ownership (or that they have licensed their work to an AI platform) without revealing the work itself. For example, a creator can encrypt a statement: “Yes, I own work X and agree to use it for AI training,” and the AI platform can verify that statement via the blockchain before actually downloading or training on the work. This way, creators do not need to disclose high-resolution originals to assert their rights—they can protect their works while providing proof of licensing. This is both consent and verification, while also protecting privacy.

In short, blockchain can serve as the transparent and trustworthy infrastructure that our new AI-driven creator economy urgently needs. It is a system built on reliable safeguards.

Ensuring Fairness in the Age of AI

Let’s be clear: AI itself is not the culprit. “Supporting creators” does not mean “against AI.” In fact, many creators would be happy to collaborate with AI or license their works for training if they could receive fair compensation.

In a world where AI can generate endless images, text, and videos with just the click of a button, these superintelligent agents are both consumers and creators. With the foundation of blockchain, this relationship can form a cycle that promotes creation and replication.

By embracing blockchain solutions for intellectual property, we can shift the narrative from “AI against creators” to “AI with creators,” co-creating together. Creators who see automatic royalties and clear attribution will be more willing to contribute their works to AI projects. Meanwhile, AI developers can obtain reliable, high-quality training data, knowing that this data is legally clean. No one needs to steal anything because there is a fair, enforceable data market.

The recent spate of lawsuits is a warning signal. AI companies must make a choice: to obtain licenses or face litigation. But the future of creativity does not have to be a zero-sum game. We can achieve a win-win situation. The technology to make this happen—mass tracking, verification, and payment of intellectual property fees—already exists.

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