Following years of a hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and a global competitive race for its development, the year 2021 marked a turning point as regulators and lawmakers around the globe increasingly turned their focus on potentially harmful effects of artificial intelligence systems. Exemplifying the global concerns, it was in November 2021 that the 193 members of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as a potential global standard-setting instrument for the regulation of AI. The UNESCO Recommendation explicitly emphasizes the profound and dynamic positive and negative impacts that artificial intelligence (AI) may have in a variety of fields but particularly on the human mind. A few months earlier, the European Commission too published a proposal for an EU Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act), intended to make the European Union “a global leader in the development of secure, trustworthy and ethical Artificial Intelligence”. In Article 5 of the EU AI Act, several prohibited AI practices are listed, one of which specifically includes the prohibition of “the placing on the market, putting into service or use of an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm.”

These two proposals for the regulation of AI highlight the drastic and potentially highly disruptive effects that recent scientific and technological advances, especially in the field of neuroscience, may have literally on all aspects of life but also specifically on law in general and intellectual property rights in particular. To exemplify the potential dangers for the integrity and rule of law, the paper first outlines the principal concerns of recent regulatory attempts to guarantee a trustworthy and safe AI. It then presents several new technologies known as “brain spyware”, which uses a combination of innovative technologies, including but not limited to machine learning, big data, functional magnetic resonance imaging as well as subliminal stimuli, to extract personal information of a user’s brain. Put simply, mind reading as well as other manipulative practices are no longer science fiction but may have already become possible. Based on this, the paper explores the potential implications that such mind reading devices may have on the one hand on the fundamental right of freedom of thought and on the other hand on copyright law in general and the idea/expression dichotomy in particular.