# Former USPTO Official Says AI Growth Should Protect Creators’ Rights By Riza Dagoc Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/regulation/41865 Published: 2026-10-27T16:44:10.000Z Updated: 2026-10-27T16:44:10.000Z Section: Regulation > Coke Morgan Stewart called intellectual-property rights the economy’s “great equalizer” as a federal court considers OpenAI’s use of copyrighted works. Coke Morgan Stewart, a former deputy under secretary of commerce for intellectual property, urged the United States Oct. 27 to preserve protections for creators and small businesses as AI development expands. Stewart also served as deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), where her role ended in July 2026. She is now president and CEO of the Council for Innovation Promotion, a coalition that advocates strong intellectual-property rights. She called those rights the economy’s “great equalizer.” Stewart pointed to a federal copyright case involving OpenAI. On Sept. 1, the United States filed a 20-page Statement of Interest in the consolidated litigation, urging the judge to reject the position that training large language models on copyrighted text is itself unlawful. The filing separates model training from outputs, saying an output that reconstructs and disseminates a protected work could raise a different legal question. It presents the government’s legal position, not a court ruling; the filing was covered in [earlier coverage of the government’s position](). The New York Times and other publishers allege copyright infringement, while OpenAI argues that using publishers’ work for model pretraining is fair use. Federal copyright law directs courts to weigh the purpose and character of a use, the type of work, the amount used and the effect on the work’s potential market. The patent findings concern startups. Those that received patents after their applications were quasi-randomly assigned to more lenient examiners had average employment growth 55% higher and sales growth 80% higher five years later. The research compared examiners with different rates of granting patents. Replies on summary-judgment motions in the consolidated case are due Nov. 20, 2026. ## Links in this article - [earlier coverage of the government’s position](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/regulation/25092)