Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law 20 years ago and is about to sign its 5,000th intellectual property client, and on Unscripted Small Business he explains what AI just broke. Copyright attaches the moment you create the work, "the best deal in intellectual property law ever," but registering it is what unlocks statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per occurrence. AI cannot be an author and AI cannot be an inventor, so using AI as a tool is fine and the trap is scope, because the problems start "when AI starts adding ideas to the invention that the inventor never contemplated." Richard also covers Getty demand letters, why a trade secret dies the moment it can be reverse engineered, and the expert-witness case where LLM-drafted work got turned over in discovery and killed the case.