Imagine it is the mid-1990s and a friend tells you about a new golf course outside Houston. “You’ve got to see this place,” he says. You ask what makes it special. “It’s Pebble Beach.” You laugh, because Pebble Beach is in California. He knows, he says, just come play it. A few holes later, you recognize something. One hole looks like Pebble Beach, another looks like TPC, and another the familiar red-and-white lighthouse from Harbour Town. You have somehow played a greatest-hits album of American golf architecture without leaving Texas. The course is called Tour 18.
From a business standpoint, this is a terrific idea. Golfers spend years dreaming about famous holes they may never get to play. Tour 18 asked a simple question: what experience do customers already want, but find difficult or expensive to reach? So it brought the experience to them. The owners of Pebble Beach and other famous courses were less enthusiastic. Litigation followed, built largely around trademarks, trade dress and unfair competition. The courts could protect names, source-identifying features and, in some circumstances, distinctive trade dress. But the larger question remained; can anyone own the design of a place?
In 2024, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick (Republican, PA) and Jimmy Panetta (Democrat, CA) introduced the BIRDIE Act; Bolstering Intellectual Rights against Digital Infringement Enhancement. The proposal would have amended the Copyright Act’s definition of an architectural work to include golf-course designs and features such as greens, tees, bunkers, lakes, paths, landscaping and topography. The American Society of Golf Course Architects backed it, arguing that simulators and video games shouldn’t reproduce a designer’s work without compensating the creator. The 2024 bill has not moved beyond Committee discussion, but that may be the least interesting thing about it.
The BIRDIE Act matters because golf is merely the easiest place to see a much larger collision coming. American intellectual-property law is very good at protecting things we can identify: inventions, books, songs, movies, brands, software and buildings. Architecture itself did not receive its modern copyright protection until the 1990 Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act. But what if the value is not a single object? What if the asset is an experience created by arranging things in an extraordinary place?
Nobody owns grass, sand or water any more than a novelist owns words or a composer owns musical notes. Creativity lives in composition. A novel guides your imagination one page at a time, just as a song guides emotion one measure at a time. A golf course guides decisions one shot at a time. Every bunker creates tension. Every dogleg withholds information. Every green asks a question that was not obvious from the tee. The golfer supplies the performance, but the architect wrote the stage directions.
That is why the old Tour 18 dispute matters. The course was not merely copying dirt; it was borrowing accumulated meaning. Pebble Beach is valuable partly because of geometry, but also because of sequence, context and memory. Move the eighteenth hole to the second and something changes. Remove the Pacific Ocean and something changes again. Erase decades of championships, famous shots and Sunday-afternoon television, and something else disappears. Same grass, but not the same asset.
This is where “experience” begins behaving like intellectual property. Consider Augusta National’s Amen Corner. Its power does not reside solely in three golf holes. It comes from where they occur in the round, what the player has already survived, what the player knows is at stake, and what can still go wrong. Move Amen Corner elsewhere and you have preserved the physical ingredients while damaging the narrative. Sequence carries value.
Disney understands this instinctively. Visitors do not enter the Magic Kingdom through Space Mountain. They arrive on Main Street, see Cinderella Castle, and then move outward into distinct lands. A museum does the same thing. So does a university campus, a Formula One circuit, and a luxury hotel,. These are not simply collections of physical assets. They are intentionally arranged journeys. The dirt, bricks and drywall are necessary. But they are not sufficient in and of themselves.
For most of history, geography protected these experiences for us. If you wanted to walk through the Louvre, you went to Paris. If you wanted to stand at the Grand Canyon, you went to Arizona. If you wanted Pebble Beach, you needed a tee time, an airline ticket and a willingness to open your wallet. Distance created scarcity, and scarcity created value. Then places became files.
Laser scanning, photogrammetry, drones, digital twins, game engines, virtual reality and generative AI are steadily separating experience from geography. A digital Pebble Beach can be stored, transmitted, modified, versioned and shared. It can reproduce today’s course or recreate an earlier version. It can change weather, green speed or pin placement. Eventually it may let four friends in four cities play the same authenticated course together - the game may be digital, but the friendships, memories, and experience are real.
At that point, the simulator is no longer merely a substitute for golf. It becomes a platform for a different experience built around the same place. Spotify did not eliminate concerts just as television did not destroy the Masters. Digital access often increases desire for the physical original. The hierarchy simply changes. The digital experience becomes discovery; the physical experience becomes pilgrimage. The bigger question is who controls the bridge between the two?
Imagine opening an app and finding five versions of Augusta National: Augusta Prime, Augusta Pro, Augusta 4K, Augusta Championship and Augusta Legends. All have five-star reviews. Only one is authorized. Which one is real? Counterfeiting is usually described as a product problem, but underneath it is an information problem. Buyers need to know whether something is what it claims to be. The better the copies become, the more valuable certainty becomes. A counterfeit does not merely copy the product. It taxes trust.
That same problem will impact digital places. An unofficial digital museum can improve the lighting, remove the crowds and add an AI guide who speaks every language. A virtual golf course can make the greens friendlier. A digital campus can combine Harvard-looking buildings, Stanford weather and MIT-style laboratories into a university that never existed. The copy may be more attractive than the reality. It may even be more fun. But once the copy begins shaping customer expectations about the original, the owner has more than a copyright problem. It has a brand-management problem.
Generative AI makes the issue harder still because customers will not merely consume these places. They will remix them. Ask a future golf engine for Pebble Beach’s ocean views, Augusta’s fairways and Pinehurst’s greens, and it may generate a beautiful course that doesn’t copy a single hole but instead borrows the design language of all three. Who authored that experience? The user who asked for it, the software company, or the architects whose work supplied the data for the Large Language Models? We are moving from licensing copies to licensing future possibilities.
That creates a new management problem I think of as the experience portfolio. Companies already manage patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, data and brands. They should begin inventorying authored experiences as well. Which physical or digital experiences are distinctive? Which depend on sequence? Which carry reputation or memory? Which can be digitized? Which should be widely distributed because abundance creates demand, and which should remain scarce because scarcity is part of the value?
The answer will not always be “lock it down.” Copying can educate, preserve and expand access. A digital Yellowstone can teach children who may never visit the park. A virtual museum can reach people who cannot travel. A simulator can introduce a golfer to a course they later decide to visit in person. The goal is not to stop reproduction. It is to build a framework for attribution, authenticity, and responsibility before somebody else builds the market around you.
This also explains why the economics extend well beyond the owner of the experience. A famous place creates a halo. Airports, hotels, restaurants, bartenders, retailers, drivers and local governments all participate. Augusta, Georgia changes during Masters week. New Orleans changes during Mardi Gras. If digital participation becomes a complement, the audience grows. If it becomes a substitute, value migrates. And value has a nasty habit of settling around whoever controls the customer relationship, the data and the payment.
That is the real lesson hiding inside the BIRDIE Act. The bill sounded almost quaint: should golf-course architects receive copyright protection when their courses are reproduced in simulators and video games? The larger question is what happens when places become software and experiences become portable.
Do not wait for Congress to tell you an experience is valuable. Law usually arrives after markets have already demonstrated the value. Look around your organization instead. What experience has been intentionally authored there? What part of it could be scanned, simulated, generated or copied? What would remain distinctive if the physical location disappeared? What should be licensed, authenticated or protected before someone else makes it portable?
The BIRDIE Act began with eighteen holes of golf. The bigger opportunity is recognizing the emerging intellectual property of place, sequence and experience. We spent the last century learning how to protect what people make. The next one may force us to decide how to protect where people go - and what happens to them when they get there.
