Day 2 – Breakout Session 5 – 10:30-11:00 AM
Room: Wildfire
If AI Created It, You Probably Can’t Own It
Brian Batt · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello
Every day, businesses are using AI to create logos, write songs, generate images, and develop products — and most of them have no idea whether they actually own what they’re making. Brian Batt, a practicing patent attorney, walked RizeCon through the four areas of intellectual property, explained how AI is both accelerating innovation and creating legal exposure that most founders haven’t thought about, and delivered the clearest summary of where the law currently stands on a question the Supreme Court hasn’t finished answering yet.
The short version: if a human conceived it and used AI as a tool to build it, you’re probably fine. If AI conceived it and you just directed the output, you may own nothing enforceable. And the gap between those two scenarios is where most businesses currently live.
What he covered
The four areas of IP and why they matter. Brian laid a foundation across trade secrets (formulas and customer lists you’re keeping private), patents (protecting how something functions or looks), trademarks (protecting brands and the market identity they represent), and copyright (protecting creative works like music, artwork, video, and writing). Each has its own governing body, its own rules, and its own problems with AI — but the sharpest issues cluster around copyright and patents.
AI is improving IP practice — and creating new exposure. On the upside, inventors are arriving at Brian’s office with cleaner, more developed ideas than before. The USPTO is implementing AI to improve patent searches. Prior art searches are faster. Trademark clearance searches are more thorough, which means fewer businesses get surprise rebranding letters two years down the road. But the same AI that’s helping find infringers is also helping rights holders find you — and copyright law is strict liability, meaning if someone can show you used their protected work without permission, the conversation is largely over.
The monkey selfie and what it means for your AI content. In 2017, a photographer named Slater set up his camera in Indonesia and a monkey took a selfie with it. When he tried to monetize the images, PETA argued the monkey owned the copyright. The court said no — Congress never intended non-humans to own copyright — but Slater didn’t own it either because he didn’t take the photo. Nobody owned it. Brian used this case to frame the core AI question: if a non-human can’t own copyright, and AI is a non-human, then who owns what AI creates?
The copyright line the Library of Congress is drawing. The Copyright Office’s current standard requires human authorship — specifically, human control over the creative output. When you type a prompt and AI generates an image, you’re not truly controlling what comes out. Put the same prompt in five times and you get five different outputs. The office’s position is that you’re essentially accepting whatever AI gives you once it’s close enough to what you wanted, and that doesn’t constitute authorship. Result: no copyright protection for purely AI-generated works.
Where it gets more nuanced is human-AI collaboration. If you create a drawing, upload it to AI to enhance it, and the final image still shows your original composition and design decisions — the location of elements, the structure, the concept — you can own your original contribution. You just have to disclaim the parts AI added. And if you then take that image into Photoshop and modify it further, adding your own creative choices on top, your ownership position strengthens. The standard is a “modicum of creativity and original authorship” — the human has to be the one making meaningful creative decisions.
The patent cases that went to every major court. An inventor named Thaler built an AI system called Davis and had it generate two inventions with no human intervention. He tried to patent them with Davis listed as the inventor. The USPTO said no — inventors must be human. Thaler sued in US federal court, the EU, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Every jurisdiction denied the patents except South Africa. His argument was reasonable: if the point of patent law is to promote innovation, shouldn’t AI-created inventions be protectable? Courts said the law doesn’t work that way. A human must conceive the idea.
The key distinction the USPTO is drawing is the same as the copyright office: AI as a laboratory or a tool — the way earlier inventors used computers or lab equipment to test and refine ideas — is fine. AI as the inventor is not. If you use AI to develop, refine, or prototype an idea that you conceived, you can still own and enforce the patent. If AI conceived the idea and you just directed the process, you probably can’t.
The Supreme Court is watching. Thaler also pushed cases on the authorship side of copyright, and that litigation is currently sitting at the Supreme Court. If the court rules that AI can be an author, the current framework changes entirely. Brian’s honest assessment: watch that space.
What attendees got
Brian’s practical takeaway was direct: the human is still the most important part of the IP equation. Ideas need to originate with you. If you have the idea and use AI to fill in the gaps, develop it, and bring it to life, your protection is intact. If you let AI generate the concept and you just edited the output, you may be building a business on something you can’t defend.
The three questions every business owner should be asking about their AI-generated content: Did a human conceive the underlying idea? Can you document meaningful human creative decisions in the output? And is the final product substantially similar to anything AI may have pulled from the web while creating it?
One moment that landed
Brian walked through a real copyright registration his firm handled. A human created an original drawing — a half-face cyborg with roses — then ran it through AI to make it more realistic. When filing the copyright, they had to disclaim the AI-enhanced elements (the realistic nose, the color and texture of the roses) while claiming ownership of the original composition (the line dividing the face, the placement of the petals, the structure). It was a surgical registration — owning exactly what the human made and nothing else. The audience responded to how procedurally specific it was: not a philosophical debate about AI, but a real decision made in a real filing, drawn precisely at the line between human and machine.
“If you have the idea and you’re using AI as a tool — as a laboratory — that’s fine. But if AI is creating it and coming up with the idea, you’re not going to be able to protect it.” — Brian Batt
“AI is going to outrun the law. It’s going to be hundreds of miles away by the time Congress catches up.” — Brian Batt
About the speaker
Brian Batt is a patent attorney whose practice focuses primarily on utility and design patents across a range of industries. He works with inventors and businesses on drafting, filing, and prosecuting patent applications, trademark registration and clearance, and copyright protection. He has watched AI transform both the volume and quality of ideas arriving at his desk — and the complexity of the legal questions that come with them.