Charles Lew is the owner of The Lew Firm, & LA Small Business Commissioner. Charles writes & speaks on the confluence of AI and the Law.
Back in 2020, I wrote a piece for Forbes called “In A Digital World, Your Most Valuable Property Is Intellectual.” I opened with a question. How do you protect your property? The answer then felt almost quaint. Alarms, metal gates, camera systems and a few security guards are stationed throughout the room. As thousands of storefronts struggled and the pandemic hollowed out main streets, I urged business owners to recognize that their most valuable property was no longer the brick and mortar they could touch. It was something far more nebulous, amorphous and intangible; it was intellectual.
Looking back, I think I was right, but for reasons I never would have predicted. I believed intellectual property would become more valuable as the economy became increasingly digital. What I did not see was that artificial intelligence would make creation itself dramatically cheaper. The prediction held, and the destination reached, the world just took a different route to get there.
When I wrote that piece, the idea that a machine could write the article, design the logo, draft the patent claim and build the app was science fiction. That world arrived faster than anyone predicted, and it has done something profound to the thesis. It has not weakened it, but made it the only thing that matters.
The Cost Of Building Just Collapsed To Zero
For most of history, the moat around any business was the difficulty of building it in the first place. You needed capital, talent, time and a tolerance for failure that most didn’t have. Execution was the wall, scarcity the protection. If building something was hard, the fact that you had built it meant something.
Generative AI took that wall and reduced it to rubble. A solo founder with a laptop can generate in an afternoon what once required a studio, an agency or an engineering team. This is genuinely democratizing, consistent with everything I have argued about access for years. Yet here is the uncomfortable truth. When everyone can build anything, building is no longer a moat. The value does not disappear, rather it migrates to the one question infinite production cannot answer. Who owns this, and who has the standing to protect it?
That question is the battleground of the future. Not who can build, because everyone can, but who can own, prove and defend what they built. Intellectual property is no longer merely your most valuable property, as I framed it in 2020. It is your last defensible one.
The Walls Moved, And So Did The Thieves
Recall the security metaphor I opened with five years ago. Alarms and gates protect a physical location from a thief who has to show up, break something and carry it out. The thief of the AI era does none of that. A competitor no longer needs to steal your product. They can ask a model to replicate your brand, voice, packaging, distinctive look and feel, and produce a convincing imitation in seconds. The walls I described still stand; the thieves simply walked around them.
This is why the protections I covered then matter more today, not less. Trademarks may be the most durable, precisely because a mark is earned through real use and reputation, and no machine can manufacture genuine market recognition on your behalf. Copyright, by contrast, the protection that once attached the moment a work was fixed in a tangible medium, has entered the most turbulent stretch of its existence.
What This Means For You Now
I closed the 2020 article with a line I still stand behind. You cannot afford not to protect your intellectual property. Here is how I would act on it now.
1. Register what matters, and do it early; an unregistered mark is an invitation.
2. Document the human hand in everything you make with AI. Authorship is the hinge on which protection turns.
3. Audit what you own, because most AI-native businesses have never asked which assets are protectable and which are exposed.
4. Treat brand as your most defensible asset, the one form of intellectual property a machine cannot counterfeit into existence.
Five years ago, I argued that in a digital world, your most valuable property is intellectual. The digital world became an intelligent one, and the thesis held, because the ground only grew more valuable as everything built on top of it became free. Anyone can build anything now; the building was never in the moat, the owning always was.
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