From Protected Subjects to AI-Native Innovators - Ownership, Disposition, and Liability in Agentic Collaborative Innovation -

초록

Generative artificial intelligence is evolving from a content-production tool into an agentic system capable of decomposing goals, developing technical solutions, working through complex formulas, writing and testing software, designing product prototypes, coordinating external services, and maintaining projects over time. In software development, digital product design, content organization, and parts of online operations, agentic AI can enable one person to perform functions previously distributed across a small firm. Yet physical manufacturing, market transactions, payment, registration, professional licensing, and legal responsibility still depend on human or organizational actors. This change is especially consequential for minors. Agentic workflows expand what they can innovate and organize in practice, but do not automatically enlarge their legal capacity to contract, dispose of long-term rights, or absorb product, data, financial, and tort risks. Technology can therefore increase practical capacity without supplying transactional authority or relocating legal responsibility. This article argues that conventional approaches are incomplete because they treat minors either as passive recipients of online protection or as ordinary adult users whose age merely limits contracting. It develops a dual-status account of the minor as both a protected person and a rights-bearing innovator. The analysis is organized around three questions: initial ownership, authority to dispose of rights, and insulation from liabilities arising during commercialization. Age should not defeat initial ownership; human contribution should be established through process evidence rather than inferred from the use or non-use of AI; and authority to license or transfer rights should depend on the transaction’s reversibility, duration, value, and external risk. Commercial responsibility should be allocated under the applicable cause of action, with particular attention to actors who control the relevant activity, benefit from it, and can prevent the harm. The best-interests principle should therefore operate not as a generalized prohibition, but as a basis for reliable ownership, supported decision-making, protection of ongoing revenue, and insulation from disproportionate liability.

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