Intellectual Property and Ownership Risks in the Digital Economy

Intellectual property disputes in the digital economy rarely arise from a lack of legal rights—they arise from uncertainty about ownership, transfer, and control across increasingly complex creation and distribution chains. AI-assisted content, outsourced production, employee and contractor contributions, and platform-based licensing models have made traditional assumptions about authorship and chain of title significantly harder to rely on in practice.

This session takes a practitioner-focused approach to intellectual property and ownership risk, examining where legal structures commonly fail across modern digital workflows. It focuses on breakdowns in chain of title, licensing ambiguity, platform-mediated rights allocation, and the limits of standard contractual drafting in environments involving AI, contractors, and multi-party content creation.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Ownership uncertainty in AI-assisted, contractor-led, and collaborative content creation, including competing claims to authorship and subsistence of rights
• Chain of title breakdowns across employees, freelancers, and platform-mediated production models
• Enforceability limits of contractual IP assignment and licensing clauses in complex digital workflows
• Platform terms of service and their effect on negotiated ownership and downstream exploitation rights
• Sublicensing and multi-layer licensing risks in digital distribution ecosystems
• AI-generated and AI-assisted content: authorship ambiguity and legal classification challenges
• Cross-border digital content creation and jurisdictional friction in ownership and enforcement
• Structural gaps in IP allocation where value is realised after creation (monetisation, investment, enforcement)