Rethinking Copyright in the Age of AI: Δ-Uncertainty, Creative Process, And the E=mc Thought Principle

This paper examines the structural crisis facing copyright law in an era whenlarge-scale AI generation has become routine, and advances philosophical andinstitutional proposals for its redesign. Conventional copyright rested on a staticpremise: that completed works belong to individual authors. AI has accelerated theexposure of this premise’s instability by making visible the processual and collectivenature of creative acts.The analysis employs the E=mc Thought Principle as its conceptual framework. Thisprinciple describes creative processes through five variables: m (the mass of an idea,i.e., structural conviction), c (velocity of action, i.e., the speed of cognitive transition),η (purity, i.e., the degree to which noise has been excluded), ρᵢ (information density,i.e., the condensation of meaning), and Δ (fluctuation, i.e., the internal representationof irreducible incomputability). Through this framework, the paper argues that thecore of the copyright problem lies not in the attribution of expression but in describingwhere meaning condenses and where it is released.Three institutional proposals are advanced: (1) an η-trace system that records creativejudgment as a logged sequence of choices; (2) a post-hoc adjustment regime based onthe scale of generated energy (E-scale adjudication); and (3) a three-layer descriptionstructure involving the creator, the institution, and the system. These proposalsfunction without evaluating the content of expression, thereby avoiding censorshipwhile enabling social calibration of creative energy flows.The paper ultimately demonstrates that the copyright crisis was not caused by AI, butthat AI has rendered visible the contradictions already latent within the modernconcept of the author. What is required is not the reinforcement of existing institutionsbut a redefinition of the structural conditions under which human creativity operates.Keywords: copyright, artificial intelligence, creativity, E=mc Thought Principle,post-hoc adjustment, authorship, palimpsest