Digital Land Rent: Trademark Scarcity, AI Production, and the Monetisation of Intangible Signifiers

Daniel Redshshaw

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: his paper argues that generative AI is reducing the cost of producing marketing assets, names, and symbolic content, shifting competitive advantage away from the production of symbolic artefacts and toward the legal and institutional control points that govern brand identity. It proposes “Digital Land Rent” as a heuristic for the economic returns that may accrue to trademark proprietors when commercially salient signifiers are legally scarce, even if they are linguistically or visually replicable. Using a decoupling framework, the paper analyses an Owner-First model in which trademarks, provenance, and narrative are developed prior to product-market operation and later licensed or transferred to operators. It also examines specification breadth, applicant intent, bad-faith doctrine, and emerging bank practices that incorporate IP valuation into lending decisions. The paper contributes to law-and-economics debates on intangible capital, trademark scope, and valuation under conditions of expanding AI-assisted production.

Keywords: Trademark; scarcity; Trademarks; Intellectual; property; Intangible; capital; Generative; AI; Artificial; intelligence; Brand; valuation; Trademark; valuation; Licensing; Trademark; licensing; Law; and; economics; Digital; scarcity; Brand; strategy; Intangible; assets; Economic; jurisprudence; Bad; faith; Non-use; IP; finance; Owner-First; model; Clean; Asset; Paradox (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K0 O3 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 0015-04-15
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/128728/1/MPRA_paper_128728.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:128728

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().