WIPO Brings AI Copyright and Ownership Debate to Geneva

By Suad Seferi · 9 November 2026

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is convening its first Global Forum on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence on November 9–10, 2026, bringing governments, legal experts, technology companies and creators together in Geneva to examine how existing intellectual property rules should respond to artificial intelligence. The two-day meeting addresses some of the most disputed legal questions surrounding AI: whether copyrighted material can be used to train models, who owns AI-assisted creations, whether machines can qualify as inventors, and how individuals should be protected when AI reproduces their voices or likenesses. According to WIPO's official programme, the forum will examine developments in legislation, court decisions and commercial licensing arrangements across different jurisdictions. The event comes as AI developers, copyright holders and creative industries continue to disagree over how existing intellectual property protections apply to increasingly capable generative AI systems. Can existing copyright laws keep up with AI? One of the central discussions scheduled for November 9 asks whether the intellectual property system remains suitable for the age of AI. The session will examine the principles behind copyright and patent protection, including how those protections encourage innovation, support creators and balance private rights with public access to knowledge. Participants listed in the programme include Cédric Manara, Google's Director and Head of Copyright, alongside legal scholars, artists and industry representatives. The discussion is relevant to a growing commercial question: how should AI companies obtain access to copyrighted material, and under what conditions should creators receive recognition or compensation? Training data remains a particularly difficult issue. AI systems can learn from vast collections of text, images, music and other material, including works protected by copyright. Different jurisdictions have taken different approaches to the legal treatment of such material, making cross-border development and licensing increasingly complicated. WIPO's forum provides an opportunity to compare those approaches, although it does not itself have the authority to establish new international copyright rules. AI-generated voices and human identity The programme also includes a discussion on protecting personal characteristics such as names, images, likenesses and voices. Generative AI tools can now produce convincing synthetic voices and representations of real individuals. Their use raises questions that extend beyond conventional copyright protections. Musician and technology advocate Imogen Heap is among the scheduled participants in the November 9 session examining whether intellectual property law can provide more coherent protection for these characteristics. Existing protections differ between jurisdictions and can involve copyright, privacy, publicity rights and other legal frameworks. The discussion will consider whether existing rights should be adapted or additional protections developed to address AI-generated representations of individuals. Who owns something created with AI? On November 10, the forum will turn to authorship and inventorship. As AI systems become more involved in writing, design, research and technical development, determining the extent of human contribution has become an important question for copyright offices, patent authorities and courts. WIPO's scheduled discussion will examine how legal frameworks built around human creators and inventors should treat outputs produced with substantial AI assistance. Another session will look at the relationship between the intellectual property used to develop AI models and the technologies incorporated into those models, including training materials, patents and different approaches to model access. The programme also includes discussions about how intellectual property offices are introducing AI into search, examination, classification and administrative services. What this means for the Western Balkans Although the forum is global, the issues under discussion are relevant to businesses, creators and institutions throughout the Western Balkans. Publishers, journalists, musicians, filmmakers and software developers increasingly encounter questions about the reuse of their work in AI systems and the commercial use of AI-generated material. Universities and research institutions also face questions about intellectual property ownership when AI contributes to research or technical inventions. The immediate significance is not a change in national legislation. Rather, WIPO's discussions provide an international reference point for governments and institutions examining how their existing legal frameworks apply to AI. For smaller markets, international licensing practices and legal developments can be particularly important when creative work and AI services cross national borders. What happens after the forum? The Global Forum is intended to become an annual platform for international dialogue on AI and intellectual property. WIPO has explicitly clarified that the forum does not have a rule-making function. Formal normative discussions and decisions remain the responsibility of its established committees. A separate meeting of WIPO's Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Interchange is scheduled for November 11. That initiative examines practical issues such as metadata, identifiers and rights-management systems, which could help creators and rights holders manage intellectual property in AI-driven environments. The immediate developments to watch are the positions expressed by participating governments, the legal approaches discussed during the sessions and any subsequent work undertaken through WIPO's existing committees. For now, the Geneva meeting places the relationship between artificial intelligence, human creativity and intellectual property at the ce…