Introduction: The philosophical gaze of Labour Day and the ontological questioning of intangible assets
Taking Labour Day as a guide to examine the development history of human civilization, its essence is a history of the recognition and alienation of labour value. From the slash-and-burn agricultural society to the digital age based on codes, models, and data, the form of human labour has experienced a profound evolution from concrete physical exertion to abstract intellectual investment. However, in the grand narrative of intangible assets and intellectual property, what exactly is the status of “labor”? This issue has always been accompanied by profound entanglements in law, economics and philosophy.
In the founding stage of intellectual property philosophy, "labor" was not only a means of creating wealth, but also a sacred source that gave absolute legitimacy to property rights. However, with the transformation of industrial capitalism into a knowledge economy, intellectual property law has gradually changed from rewarding "labor" to a one-dimensional promotion of "wisdom" and "originality". Sweat and wisdom, labour and creation, these two concepts have competed fiercely in the history of global jurisprudence for more than a hundred years, forming a legal picture full of paradoxes and compromises. Today, when generative artificial intelligence (AI) has destroyed humankind's monopoly on "creativity" with unprecedented computing power, the standards of "wisdom" and "originality" in traditional copyright theory are accelerating towards nothingness. Just as the "Age of Mappo" predicted in Buddhist teachings, complicated and advanced teachings have become ineffective, and only the most basic practice can be returned. In the age of intellectual property apocalypse, we have to engage in extreme speculation: Is the only thing that can save intangible assets from nothingness the once despised "sweat theory"? The fetters of reality and the underlying logic have repeatedly confirmed that the "sweat theory" is indeed the most basic and inalienable core of maintaining the human property order.
The origin of the theory: Locke’s labour rights confirmation and the early expansion of “sweat theory”
The invisible extension of Locke’s theory of labour property rights
Discussion of the relationship between intellectual property and labour must be traced back to the Labour Theory of Property by the British philosopher John Locke in the 17th century. Locke proposed in his "Treatise of Government" (Part 2) that God gave the world to mankind as common property, but each person has exclusive natural rights to his own body and the labour produced by the body; when individuals mix their own "labor" with items in a common state in nature, these items are converted into private property 1.
This theory was originally intended to provide justification for traditional tangible material property (such as land, water, personal belongings), but its profound logic naturally extends to the field of intangible assets: the fruits of ideas are regarded as the direct products of individual mental and physical labour and should be protected by property rights 1 . Under Locke's framework, the legitimacy of property comes with two well-known prerequisites: the first is the principle of "non-waste", that is, an individual's acquisition should not exceed the limit that he can effectively use; the second is the principle of "enough and as good" (enough and as good), that is, personal possession should not damage the rights of others to use common resources. 1 In the physical world, these two conditions often face challenges due to the scarcity and competitive nature of resources; but in the intangible world of information and ideas, access to data is often non-exclusive, which makes the application of Locke’s labour theory in the field of intellectual property even more perfect than in the physical world, thus constructing the most original and solid source of legitimacy for the intellectual property system. 3
"Sweat first" in the early common law system
This simple understanding based on "labor is the confirmation of rights" gave birth to the famous "Sweat of the Brow Doctrine" in early intellectual property judicial practice. This theory asserts that as long as an individual spends a lot of time, money and sweat (labor) in the process of collecting and organizing facts and information, even if the final output lacks a high degree of artistic creativity or profound wisdom, this pure "hard work" itself is enough to build a barrier to copyright protection 6.
In the British Empire and the countries of the common law system in the broad sense from the 19th to the early 20th century, the "sweat theory" was the absolute standard for protecting information compilation works. The business information industry at that time mainly consisted of practical tools such as maps, telephone directories, and horse racing schedules, and their practical value was far greater than their aesthetic value.
Case 1: Kelly v. Morris (1866) and Walter v. Lane (1900) In the UK in 1866 *Kelly v. Morris* In the case, the court clearly pointed out when dealing with plagiarism disputes in commercial catalogs that for compilation works such as dictionaries, maps, guides, or directories, as long as the compiler has paid the labour and expense of collecting and presenting the information, it should be rewarded with copyright; no one may directly copy the labour results of others in order to save their own time, labor, and expenses. 10 The subsequent case of *Walter v. Lane* (1900) took this logic to an extreme. The case involved a stenographic report of a public political speech by The Times. The court ultimately ruled that although the stenographer merely faithfully recorded the speech and did not perform any substantial subjective content creation of the speech, his "sweat of the brow" in converting spoken language into accurate written text was sufficient to generate copyright. 7
Example 2: University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press (1916) In 1916, when the British court was hearing a copyright dispute over the University of London examination papers, the presiding judge proposed the most famous and controversial pragmatism rule in the history of British copyright: "What is worth copying is prima facie worth protecting" (What is worth copying is prima facie worth protecting)13. This assertion clearly demonstrates the business logic of the “sweat theory”: the object of copyright protection does not lie in its inherent artistic originality or scientific wisdom, but in its condensed labour costs that make it economically valuable to be plagiarized by commercial competitors in the market. 16 This represents the most direct response of intellectual property to labour investment in the infancy of capitalism.
| Philosophical basis | Core rights claims | Fields of application | Representative judicial motto |
|---|---|---|---|
| Locke's theory of labour property rights | Individuals have natural rights to the output of their own labor, and mixed labour produces property. | Compilation of works, trade directories, data collection, shorthand recording. | “What is worth copying is, on the face of it, worth protecting.” |
| Instrumentalist Incentive Theory | Rewards for labour must be provided to stimulate the continued production of social wealth and information. | Factual and practical non-fiction. | “No free riding.” |
The Transgression of Wisdom: The Awakening of Originality Standards and the Defeat of the “Sweat Theory”
However, with the evolution of legal philosophy, the threshold for copyright protection has been infinitely lowered to “manual labour and financial investment”, which has inevitably led to the hidden dangers of information monopoly and obstacles to the acquisition of public knowledge. From the end of the 19th century to the 20th century, Personality Theory (Personality Theory) represented by Kant and Hegel began to penetrate into the intellectual property system. Personality theory believes that works must be an extension and externalization of the author's personality, and must reflect human beings' unique spiritual creativity and subjective choices 12. Under the influence of this thought, copyright law gradually formed a chain of contempt for "high-level" and "low-level" works, began to only respect "wisdom" and "originality", and regarded pure "sweat" as hard labour that was not eligible for copyright.
Milestone of Originality Standard Established
Example 3: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (1991) At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court passed a historic judgment, dealing a devastating blow to the "sweat theory." In the 1991 *Feist* case, the plaintiff Rural Telephone Company, as a local monopoly, expended a lot of manpower and material resources to produce a white-page telephone directory containing the names, addresses and telephone numbers of local residents in accordance with legal requirements. After being denied authorization, the defendant Feist Company directly copied 4,000 of the entries without permission (which even contained false anti-counterfeiting entries deliberately implanted by the plaintiff)18. With all lower courts supporting the plaintiffs, the U.S. Supreme Court made an epoch-making overturning ruling: unanimously rejecting the plaintiffs’ copyright claims and completely abolishing the long-standing “sweat theory” 6 .
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor profoundly pointed out in the judgment that the touchstone of copyright protection is "originality", and originality requires that the work must possess "a modicum of creativity"9. The court emphasized that the facts themselves are not protected by copyright, no matter how much "sweat of the brow" the compiler expends. Arranging phone numbers in English alphabetical order is a “simple and obvious”, impersonal act that does not involve any creative choice of human ingenuity. 6 What is even more shocking is that the Supreme Court declared that this originality threshold is constitutionally mandated by the U.S. Constitution and is not merely a discretionary matter of statutory law. 9 The *Feist* case profoundly announced a change in legal philosophy: the core mission of copyright law is to promote the advancement of science and practical arts, rather than to protect the commercial interests of compilers; tolerating fact-based "free-riding" is actually part of the constitutional principle9.
Global justice follows and imitates “wisdom”
The shock wave of the *Feist* case quickly swept across the world. Many legal jurisdictions began to reflect on and raise the threshold of copyright protection, gradually moving closer to the "intelligent creation" theory, and one after another took advantage of the local "sweat theory."
Example 4: Macmillan v. Cooper and D.B. Modak case (India) In the development of Indian copyright law, it was deeply influenced by the British Privy Council in the early days. For example, in the 1924 case of *Macmillan & Co Ltd v K. and J Cooper*, the protection of labor, skills and capital was still emphasized 25. But in the later case *D.B. Modak and Anr. v Eastern Book Company* (2008), the Supreme Court of India officially abandoned the "sweat theory" and turned to reliance on the "modicum of creativity" test, clearly declaring that the creativity (wisdom) of knowledge selection and judgment is higher than mere manual labour 25.
Example 5: Telstra v. Phone Directories (2010) (Australia) Australian judicial practice has also experienced a painful transformation. In the 2002 case of *Desktop Marketing Systems v Telstra*, the Australian Federal Court once upheld a labour protection approach similar to the UK's *Walter v Lane*, holding that the labour of collecting facts was sufficient to generate copyright 18. However, just eight years later in Telstra Corporation Ltd v Phone Directories Co Pty Ltd in 2010, the Federal Court overturned the precedent in its entirety and refused to provide copyright protection for the white and yellow pages telephone directories that involved a huge data collection effort18. The judgment reiterated that the time and effort expended in the creation process alone are not sufficient to constitute a protected compilation work. There must be creative intellectual effort directed toward the expression of the work, and it must be traceable to an identifiable human author with independent intellectual contributions. 27
The fetters of reality and underlying compromise: Data protection’s secret return to the “sweat theory”
As revealed by Hegelian dialectics, the development of things always spirals upward in the alternation of positive, negative and combination. Although the *Feist* case won applause in the halls of jurisprudence and established the supreme dignity of human wisdom, it opened a huge gap in the actual business and economic operations: If a company spends hundreds of millions, and the commercial database or map data compiled after years of field measurements and manual verification cannot obtain any copyright protection simply because of "lack of creative arrangement and presentation", who will have the motivation to engage in such vital but boring data infrastructure work?
There has always been an invisible internal drive guiding the direction of the law—this is the logic of capital survival, the rigid demand for investment returns for industrial development, and the human instinct to resist the "tragedy of the commons." If pure labour cannot obtain exclusive property protection, the underlying investment mechanism of the entire digital economy will collapse. Therefore, in addition to the traditional intellectual property system that seems to hold high the banner of "intelligent originality", modern data law has essentially completed a comprehensive return to the "sweat theory" by starting anew and establishing new rights.
A weak compromise in the cracks of the law: The Kleine Münze theory
Example 6: Germany’s “Small Coin” Theory (Kleine Münze) While the Anglo-American legal system undergoes a drastic shift, the civil law system shows a more pragmatic theoretical balance. German copyright law has long adhered to a strict authorship (droit d'auteur) system, emphasizing that works should be the product of the author's personal intellectual creation. However, in the face of low-creativity but high-labor input works such as instructions, catalogs, and timetables, the German judiciary developed the "Kleine Münze" (small coin) theory 30 . This theory allows for copyright protection to be granted to simple works that meet only a very low threshold of creativity, known as "everyday change"33. Although German legal circles argue that the "small coin" theory is not entirely equivalent to the "sweat theory" that protects pure labor, it actually covers a large number of labor-intensive information products with the cloak of legal protection by deliberately lowering the entry threshold for "wisdom" 30 . This reflects the judicial system's realistic concessions to "labor and investment value" while adhering to the bottom line of "wisdom."
The EU’s dual-track system and labour rights
Case 7: EU Database Directive, 1996 European legislators are extremely keenly aware of the disastrous vacuum that strict "originality" standards have brought to the information industry. In order to protect the huge investment in the database industry without destroying traditional copyright standards, the European Union passed the "Database Directive" in 1996. This directive adopts a very creative dual-track system: on the one hand, it provides traditional copyright protection for advanced databases with creative selection or arrangement; on the other hand, it creates an unprecedented exclusive "Sui Generis Right"35.
The triggering conditions for this special right are extremely straightforward: as long as the producer of the database has invested a "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying or presenting the content, whether this investment is in the form of money, time or pure labor, it can obtain monopoly protection for up to 15 years and can be renewed indefinitely with updates. 37 This kind of institutional design, which does not care about creativity but only about investment and labor, is widely regarded by the international legal community as the legal "resurrection" of the "sweat theory" at the European legislative level. 39 It openly declares to the world that in the era of digital economy, pure physical strength and capital, even if stripped of the pretense of wisdom and expression, still have sacrosanct property attributes.
Local practice and labour closed loop of China’s data legislation
China, which is at the forefront of the digital economy, also faces the world-class problem of confirming the rights of data elements. China’s data legal theory and policy practice demonstrate a more thorough return to labour value than the West, and the legal analysis behind it directly echoes Locke’s classical theory 42 .
Case 8: Sina v. Maimai, 2016\) At a time when data-specific legislation was still blank, Chinese courts took the lead in passing competition law to protect the fruits of labour of data collectors. In the 2016 "Sina v. Maimai case", the court determined that Maimai's behaviour of grabbing Sina Weibo user data without consent constituted unfair competition. The court's ruling logic directly pointed to the commercial value of labor: in the Internet economy, user-scale data is an important competitive asset accumulated by enterprises at huge costs and operational labor, and should receive absolute protection from the law 44. The judge did not get bogged down in the quagmire of whether the data entries were "original," but directly recognized and protected the "sweat" shed by the platform in collecting and cleaning data.
Example 9: China's "Twenty Data Articles" and "Separation of Three Rights" In 2022, China issued the landmark "Opinions on Building a Data Basic System to Better Play the Role of Data Elements" (i.e., the "Twenty Data Articles"), creatively proposing a "three-right separation" system for data property rights: the right to hold data resources, the right to use data processing, and the right to operate data products 43.
The underlying logic of this institutional design has been accurately interpreted by scholars as a perfect reproduction of Locke’s theory of labour property rights in the digital age. 42 The policy clearly states that data property rights are civil rights based on the “labor input” and market status of each participant45. The data is originally in an ownerless and disordered natural state. Once it is "collected" and fixed by the platform or individuals through equipment and legal labor, the data resource ownership rights are generated; then, through further "digital labor" such as computing power cleaning and labeling, processing and use rights and product management rights are derived 43. Here, “original intelligence” is no longer a necessary condition for obtaining data rights. As long as digital labour is condensed, the fortress of rights will be established. This policy orientation clearly proves that the instinct of fairness to prevent the fruits of labour from being deprived of without compensation has always dominated the legal system’s rational return to the sweat theory 45 .
| Protection Mode | Core Trigger Conditions | Applicable Countries/Regions | Theoretical Essence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kleine Münze (Small Coin) | A minimal amount of creativity is enough. | Some civil law countries such as Germany | In the name of wisdom, they make compromises to protect the reality of labor. |
| Sui Generis Right | There is a "substantial investment" (labor, money) in the acquisition, verification or presentation of the data. | EU Member States (e.g. 1996 Database Directive) | A complete "sweat theory" restoration, replacing copyright with special property rights. |
| Anti-unfair competition law protection | Violate the principle of good faith and seize other parties' competitive data assets for nothing. | China (such as Sina v. Maimai case), some state laws in the United States | Labour investment protection from the perspective of business ethics. |
| Data "separation of three rights" | Based on "labor input" and market mechanisms of legal collection and processing. | China (20 data items) | A digital-age version of Locke’s labour rights theory. |
Crisis under the metaphor of Buddhism: the "end of Dharma era" of artificial intelligence and intellectual property
If the return of data law is just a helpless repair of the boundary of "intelligent originality", then the full outbreak of generative AI (such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion) has launched a devastating ontological attack on the modern intellectual property building with "originality" as its absolute core. We are irreversibly witnessing an "era of apocalypse" in both legal and philosophical terms.
In the grand historical view of Buddhism, the period after the death of the Buddha is divided into three eras: True Dharma, Semblance Dharma, and Mappo/Degenerate Age 46. In the Age of Dharma Ending, the profound teachings (such as the high-level standards of wisdom and originality in traditional copyrights) have been misinterpreted, and sentient beings have shallow abilities and are no longer able to achieve enlightenment and liberation through their own meditation and wisdom (self-power) 47. As eminent monks such as Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren of the Tendai Sect and Pure Land Sect of Japanese Buddhism have pointed out, in the Age of Dharma Ending, complicated theories are no longer effective, and sentient beings can only rely on the most basic and straightforward methods. Next, the practice that least requires profound wisdom - that is, pure behavioral investment, such as endlessly repeating the name of Amitabha (reciting the Buddha's name) or the title of the Lotus Sutra (singing the title) - this kind of repeated investment, which is close to "physical labour and sweat", can achieve the ultimate salvation. 46.
It is spine-chilling to map this profound philosophical metaphor to the current intellectual property field. From the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, we constructed a "legal era" with romantic "authorship" as its core. In this era, "originality" is regarded as a sacred and inviolable teaching, and the unique spark of human thought, the devotion of the soul, and the free expression of personality are the only ways for works to obtain copyright protection 12. However, when AI models are able to generate works that surpass the vast majority of top human painters, composers, and writers in a matter of seconds, the "intelligent creativity" that humans are proud of is completely deconstructed and mediocre in the face of the violent parameter matrix and computing power of machines. Originality theory, as the former "right method", is irreversibly coming to an end.
Copyright-free AI works and the “death of the author”
Looking at AI-generated works within traditional legal dogma, a cold and extremely destructive reality is spreading: due to the lack of the "direct creative process" of the human mind, these stunning works are being deprived of property rights in batches and falling directly into the unprotected public domain (Public Domain).
Example 10: Thaler v. Perlmutter case and global rejection of AI authorship In the landmark case *Thaler v. Perlmutter* in the United States, the U.S. Copyright Office and subsequent federal courts resolutely refused to register copyright for a visual art work independently generated by an artificial intelligence system called the "Creativity Machine" 51. In the judgment, the judge almost tragically reiterated the long-standing core belief: Human creativity (Human Creativity) is an indispensable prerequisite for copyright capabilities (*sine qua non*) and is the core of the entire copyright system51. No matter how beautiful and apparently “intelligent” the product generated by AI is, as long as it is not a direct extension of human neuron activity and as long as it is divorced from human authorship, it cannot be owned as intellectual property. 52
The same legal impasse occurs in the UK, India and other jurisdictions. In the legal extension of relevant cases such as Rupendra Kashyap* and Tech Plus Media* in India, the court clearly stated that the ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect and reward the "fruits of human labour and authorship" rather than to reward purely commercial output derived from machine operations. 25 Therefore, no algorithm or machine that is not human can be granted authorship.
In the logic of generative AI, the machine takes on all "color matching, composition selection, word arrangement and logical deduction" - this is the core category of wisdom and originality in the traditional sense. What the human operator does is just enter a few prompt words (Prompt) in the dialog box. At this point, wisdom has become cheap and automated, and originality has completely lost its scarcity and sacredness. If the judiciary continues to blindly adhere to the strict "created by human wisdom" theory, then most of the visual arts, music, copywriting and codes that generate huge economic value in the future will be completely "uncopyrighted". Investment will dry up due to the inability to confirm rights, and complete copyright nihilism will destroy the foundation of the global digital content industry. In this "law-ending era" of intellectual property theory, the old way of relying on so-called profound "wisdom" and "originality" to identify intangible assets has been completely blocked by the monolith of algorithms.
Nirvana and Salvation: Sweat Theory as the Ultimate Core of Intangible Assets
When the fog of wisdom is ruthlessly blown away by algorithms, when the myth of "originality" is shattered in front of neural networks, in this deep crisis of existentialism caused by AI, is the only thing that can save the entire intangible asset protection system from collapse, the "sweat theory" that was once despised and ruthlessly abandoned in the *Feist* case? The most cutting-edge judicial practice in reality gives a shocking affirmative answer.
In the age of the end of the Dharma, only daily chanting and pure action investment can save desperate believers; in the era of AI generation, only the small but indispensable human "sweat" hidden behind the cold machines can save works from free deprivation - that is, investment in computing power, model fine-tuning and prompt engineering (Prompt Engineering).
Case 11: Li v. Liu case (substantial perspective on the first AI drawing case in Beijing Internet Court) In 2023, the "Li v. Liu case" heard by the Beijing Internet Court provided a very forward-looking and controversial breakthrough sample for the global AI copyright protection crisis 12. The plaintiff used the open source Stable Diffusion model to generate a picture called "Spring Breeze Sends a Good Man". From the perspective of traditional "wisdom", the specific line drawing, colour shading, and light and shadow construction of the picture are all automatically completed by AI algorithms. Humans do not hold the pen, and it seems that they have not invested in "artistic creation wisdom" in the traditional sense.
However, the court made a ground-breaking judgment in this case that the plaintiff owned the copyright and the defendant infringed the copyright. Peeling away the rhetorical coat of the judgment, the court's reasoning can be called a comprehensive rebirth of the modern digital version of the "sweat theory": the court examined all the plaintiff's "behavioral labor" in the process of generating the picture in great detail, including the initial conception, extremely complex prompt word design (the plaintiff entered as many as dozens of forward prompt words and 120 reverse prompt words), precise parameter settings, and repeated iteration and screening labour of constantly adjusting seed values 12. The court held that the plaintiff had invested a lot of "intellectual inputs" through the above-mentioned complicated process, and this continuous adjustment, screening and "curation" profoundly reflected human choices and arrangements. 12
Many astute legal scholars in the West pointed out sharply when analysing this case that although the Beijing Internet Court's judgment carefully invoked traditional concepts such as "intellectual achievements" and "aesthetic personality choice" in literal terms, its underlying logic and adjudicatory impulses are essentially a powerful resurgence of the "sweat theory" (reflects sweat of the brow reasoning)12. In the case where AI performs almost all "expressive creation", the court directly equated the human operator's extensive "prompt word editing labor", "parameter debugging" and "result screening" with human authorship. The court set the tone of its adjudication framework as a macro policy orientation that encourages the use of AI tools for industrial innovation and promotes technological development. This perfectly echoes the original utilitarian intention of the 19th century “sweat theory” to encourage capital investment and repetitive labor. 12 This proves that in times of crisis, it is still the sweat of human labour that can provide a moat.
Sure enough, sweat theory is the most basic core
Through the evolution of the above ten classic cases that span more than a century, span the Anglo-American legal system and the civil law system, and involve everything from yellow page telephone directories to cutting-edge generative large-scale models, we can re-examine the ultimate relationship between "labor/sweat" and "creation/wisdom" in a more grand and in-depth philosophical coordinate system. Facts have proved that wisdom may be a gorgeous flower that blooms occasionally, but sweat is the solid root system rooted deep in the soil and maintaining vitality.
1. Return to ontology from appearance: In the early days of agricultural society and industrial society, the essence of property was the possession of scarce physical resources, and physical labour (sweat) was the absolute and self-evident source of legitimacy (the core of Locke's theory). In the era of knowledge economy, due to the long-term monopoly of complex intellectual activities by humans, the legal community has developed a kind of theoretical arrogance, believing that the value of intellectual achievements lies only in its extraordinary "originality", thereby trying to expel mediocre "labor and sweat" from the sacred palace of intellectual property. However, the dilemma of modern data legislation and the impact of dimensionality reduction in the AI era have ruthlessly exposed this illusion of personality constructed by Kant and Hegel. When "originality" is easily deconstructed by machines, "labor" once again emerges as the only real value anchor.
2. Democratization of wisdom and the eternity of labor: The essence of artificial intelligence is the compression and automated violent output of human historical knowledge as a whole. It turns "smart creation" into an infrastructure service that is as cheap and on-demand as running water and electricity. When "exquisite composition," "gorgeous rhetoric," and "complex melody" no longer constitute any creative threshold, the value focus of the work has undergone an irreversible shift. What determines the value of an AI-generated work and a huge database is no longer the black-box generation operation inside the machine, but the precise prompt words input by human users on the front end, the painstaking screening of hundreds or thousands of generated results, and the massive data cleaning, alignment, and labeling labour invested by countless engineers and outsourced labour to train the model. These seemingly devoid of artistic brilliance are all “Digital Sweat” in the modern sense. In an era when wisdom has become cheap, only sweat maintains its scarcity and authenticity.
3. Invisible internal driving force: The necessity of survival and capital: Whether it is the EU's "Database Directive" that protects substantive investment, China's "Data Twenty" that confirms labour input, or the Beijing Internet Court's comprehensive recognition of prompt word debugging labor, there is always an invisible and extremely strong internal driving force behind it - that is, the economic operation of human society must follow the basic incentive mechanism of "input-return". Locke's theory has not become outdated across three centuries, but the form of "labor" has changed from wielding a hoe to typing on the keyboard, cleaning data, fine-tuning parameters, and building computing clusters. Without the protection of underlying property rights, any form of labour (whether physical or intellectual investment) will face the tragic fate of being ruthlessly plundered, and the innovation and investment mechanism of the entire digital industry will completely stagnate. Therefore, returning to the sweat theory is not a compromise with mediocrity, but a tribute to the economic axioms that maintain the operation of human society.
Conclusion: Reshape the labour belief in intellectual property through speculation
Taking Labour Day as a guide, we completed a profound philosophical tracing and legal analysis on the nature of intangible assets. In this festival that pays tribute to all workers, we find that labour not only shapes the material world, but is also the ultimate cornerstone of maintaining spiritual and digital property order.
The relationship between intellectual property and labour has never been a one-way road of endless evolution from low-level physical strength to high-level wisdom, as described by modern romantic copyright theory. On the contrary, it is a Möbius strip that interlocks history and reality and is full of internal tension. The repeated entanglement between "sweat theory" and "intelligent creation" runs through the entire modernization process of copyright law. In the past 100 years, the case group represented by the *Feist* case in the United States has tried in an extremely tough manner to elevate "intelligence and originality" to the altar, and relegated capital investment and human "sweat" to dust unworthy of copyright.
However, as Marxism says, practice is the only criterion for testing theory and logic. The fetters in reality - the huge data industry's extreme hunger for rights, forcing legislators around the world to take back the "sweat theory" in a secret or public way through the creation of special rights or the use of anti-unfair competition laws in the strict cracks of "originality". Nowadays, the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence has pushed the theory of "intelligent originality" to the brink of bankruptcy. In the "Apocalyptic Age" where machines can produce thousands of exquisite masterpieces in milliseconds, human beings' pitiful flash of inspiration is no longer enough to serve as the only yardstick for dividing property rights.
At this point, after extreme speculation, we suddenly realized that the so-called superior "originality" and "human wisdom" may be just a special case with a small probability in the long history. It is an excessive beautification and obsession of human beings with their own scarce mental abilities within a certain period of technical limitations. When machines have completely taken over the forms of expression of creation and washed away all the lead, the most basic and core source that supports the entire intangible asset value building, prevents human intellectual achievements from becoming a tragedy of the commons, and maintains the operation of the social investment incentive mechanism is the oldest and simplest - "sweat".
Whether it is the golden ears of wheat cultivated by sweat dripping from the soil, or the massive data and AI images gathered due to the consumption of computing power, code typing and prompt word debugging in front of the roaring server room and flashing screens, their essence is the condensation of human life time and the transformation of energy. In this "Dharma-ending Age" where knowledge creation is facing comprehensive deconstruction, the only thing that can bring nirvana and salvation is the re-conversion of the value of labor. Recognizing and embracing the "sweat theory" is not a regression in the development of intellectual property theory, but the ultimate insight and rational return to the underlying operating laws of things and the logic of business survival after humans abandon the false intellectual arrogance of anthropocentrism. This is not only a firm defence of the legitimacy of property, but also the highest tribute to the dignity of being born and working and struggling in the world.
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