One day, a quiet thought crossed my mind. What is intellectual property actually protecting?

Copyrights, patents, trademarks. We take them all for granted. But when, and for what purpose, were these "givens" created?

Someone wrote a book. Someone painted a picture. Someone made an invention, or composed a melody. The system of intellectual property was born to protect those people. It is a mechanism to answer the questions of who made it, who owns it, and to whom the profits belong.

I have no intention of rejecting this approach. Rather, I believe it is a necessary system. Yet lately, I feel that a growing number of things can no longer be fully explained by this framework alone.

Take manga, for example. There is the manga artist, the editor, the publisher, the anime studio, the sponsors, the readers, and the fans. To whom, then, does the work belong? The legal answer is clear. But the cultural answer is far more complex.

Does Dragon Ball belong to Akira Toriyama? Of course it does. At the same time, however, there were editors, animation staff, game developers, and readers all over the world. A work is born from an individual. But culture is never born alone.

The same is true for anime. Is Studio Ghibli simply a film production company? In a sense, yes. Yet to me, it looks slightly different. Ghibli does not just make movies. They shape how we view the world itself. What is nature? What does it mean to work? What does it mean to live? They offer these meanings to us through their works.

If so, does the value reside only within the work itself? Or does it live within the worldview that the work has generated?

The advent of AI has made this question even more profound. AI writes text, paints pictures, composes music, and writes code—and its precision improves day by day. It is only natural that we feel a sense of unease. Whose creative work is this? Whose right is it? Who should benefit?

These are valid questions. Yet, I find myself thinking about something prior to them. Is the real value in the generated text itself? Or is it in the context that allows that text to be read as something meaningful?

The same text takes on a different meaning depending on who reads it. As times change and society shifts, the meaning changes as well. Meaning does not exist solely within the text. It is something that arises in the space between people.

Here, we realize something curious. While the intellectual property system can protect a work, it cannot protect the meaning itself.

The market is no different. The technology existed long before the term "cloud" was coined. Research had been accumulating long before "AI" became a buzzword. Digital transformation was already underway before "DX" was ever used. It is not the technology that changed. It is the meaning.

Someone described the world in a different way than before. Someone gave it new words and wove a new narrative. At that very moment, a market was born.

For a long time, I have been drawn to those moments. Telecommunications, manufacturing, authentication, software, AI. When looking across various industries, there are moments when things that were once separate suddenly connect. It is in those precise moments that new words, new diagrams, and new markets are born.

Who, then, owns the value created there?

Of course, there is a legal answer. There are contracts, copyrights, and the concept of works made for hire. These are certainly necessary. But I am interested in what lies prior to that. Who first brought that meaning to life? Who changed the way we view the world? Who drew the new boundaries and defined the new market?

For now, I tentatively call this "Meaning IP." It is not yet a system. It is not a law. It is nothing more than a hypothesis.

Even so, entering the age of AI, this hypothesis seems to carry more weight than before. As information continues to multiply, content overflows, and even generation is automated, what becomes scarce in a world of excess? Meaning.

What to believe? What to choose? What matters? Which future to pursue? The value of these questions has become greater than ever before.

Intellectual property protects the work. But in the coming era, that may no longer be enough. We cannot own meaning itself. Yet, the people who generate meaning certainly exist.

I do not have the answer yet. I simply believe that going forward, intellectual property will have to contend not just with the work, but with meaning itself. This is what has been on my mind lately. And whatever lies beyond that question, I tentatively call Meaning IP.

© SHIRO & Co.

First published: 2026-06-02