Owning the Simulacrum: Commodification, Intellectual Property, and the Collapse of Epistemic Sovereignty

This paper continues a reflexive Research Through Design (RTD) inquiry initiated in Simulation Without Ground and Seeds of Sovereignty, extending its scope from the epistemic disintegration within generative AI systems to their legal and economic codification. Using RTD as both method and critique, we treat intellectual property (IP) law and commodification not as neutral structures but as epistemic simulations—design artifacts that encode power, erase referents, and reify hallucination as value.Drawing on Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, Monett and Paquet’s critique of automated epistemologies, and emerging jurisprudence around AI authorship, we introduce the concept of juridical referentiality to describe how law increasingly mirrors the ungrounded patterns of generative systems. The law, like AI, now performs alignment—simulating authorship, creativity, and consent through recursive abstraction.Through a reflexive RTD lens, we interrogate these patterns and propose alternatives grounded in epistemic pluralism, regenerative authorship, and friction-led design. The paper culminates in a hybrid framework—bridging design and legal governance—that resists epistemic enclosure and restores referential integrity in a world governed by simulation.