Every month, the legal news on artificial intelligence is enriched by legislative developments and new court or administrative rulings around the world. This article takes a brief inventory of the first decisions from various jurisdictions, each applying its own domestic laws to rule on claims of intellectual property rights over works generated with the help of AI.
The majority of the early rulings on whether AI-generated works can benefit from copyright protection say: NO!
United States Copyright Office, February 21, 2023, Kristina Kashtanova, "Zarya of the Dawn": one of the first decisions
Kristina Kashtanova applied to the U.S. Copyright Office for registration of her comic book, in which all the images were generated by Midjourney’s artificial intelligence.
After initially accepting the application, the U.S. Copyright Office later partially revised its decision upon discovering that the author had used AI to create the images. The Office decided that the new registration would be limited to the text and the arrangement of the images.
This is because the artist failed to demonstrate having had sufficient control over the AI-generated images, despite the time and editorial effort spent in writing the prompts.
For the U.S. Copyright Office, the primary involvement of a human being in the creative process is an essential criterion.
United States District Court, District of Columbia, Stephen Taller v. Shira Perlmutter, August 18, 2023:
Stephen Taller tried to protect a work titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise" created by his AI "Creativity Machine".
In keeping with the position of the U.S. Copyright Office, the District Court confirmed that only a human being can be an author and thus denied copyright protection for the work created by the AI system.
The Court stressed that the creativity required for copyright protection must come from a human being.
U.S. Copyright Review Board, Jason Allen, "Space Opera Theater," September 5, 2023:
After winning an award, Jason Allen sought to register an AI-generated work.
The U.S. Copyright Office determined that the work contained too many AI contributions to be copyrightable, despite Allen's efforts to demonstrate his creative input. Allen provided Midjourney with 624 prompts and argued that he had reworked the image, but the Office ruled that the AI's contribution was too important to be ignored.
Prague Municipal Court, October 11, 2023:
The Prague Municipal Court ruled that an image generated by the AI DALL-E could not be protected by copyright, as the plaintiff had failed to prove that he was the author of the image and that it resulted from his personal creative activity. Nor was the prompt used to generate the image protected, as it fell within the realm of ideas. The Court emphasized that only a natural person can be recognized as the author of a work protected by copyright.
Against this trend, we have noted a decision by the Chinese courts and a recent decision by the U.S. Copyright Office, which take the opposite position:
Beijing Internet Court, Li v. Liu, November 27, 2023:
In an infringement case, the Beijing Court examined the originality of an image generated by the AI Stable Diffusion.
Contrary to the above outcomes, the Beijing Court granted copyright protection to this image, considering that it reflected the intellectual investment and personal expression of its creator.
Regarding ownership of the copyright, the Court rejected the idea that the AI provider could be considered the author of the image, since, as the designer of the AI model, it had never initiated the work and had shown no intention of creating it.
The Court therefore ruled that the AI user, who had initiated and intellectually invested in the creation of the image, was the copyright owner.
U.S. Copyright Office, January 30, 2025, A Single Piece of American Cheese:
Similarly, in January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office published a new report stating that works created with the help of prompts could not be protected by copyright, but agreed to protect the work A Single Piece of American Cheese, created with the help of Invoke AI:
For those who fear the disturbances that these generative AIs will generate, these decisions are reassuring: human beings still seem to have their place in the creative universe. And a number of national laws explicitly insist that, for copyright protection to be granted, a human being must have been involved in a creative process.
In Europe, and particularly in France, works made using AI systems will only be protected insofar as the users can demonstrate both the originality of the work and the link between the work and a natural or legal person exploiting it.
However, it is clear that the legislator will soon need to adapt copyright legislation or consider creating a hybrid protection system to protect these new creations that result from a joint man-machine action.
