Comment by kingofmen

The purpose of intellectual property is to give an incentive to produce new knowledge (and art) by giving the inventor a way to monetize their work. Arguably this does not particularly work; but if you accept the argument then it seems to generalize fairly cleanly to AI. It's giving people an incentive to point their AIs at problems they're familiar with, and do the work to publish a solution for everyone, not just a hacked-up fix for themselves.