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The
nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress
and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a
million copyright applications per year covering millions of
individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register
works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case
basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's
approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official
describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a
work that warrants copyright protections.
“Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI
systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement
from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the
office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's
handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated
output with “creative arrangements or modifications" could also
make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded
opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI
developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright
claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply
prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work
doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work,
according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose
expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would
undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of
copyright,” Perlmutter said.
Not addressed in the report is the debate over copyrighted human
works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources
and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or
compensation. Visual artists, authors, news organizations and
others have sued AI companies for copyright theft in cases that
are still working through U.S. courts.
The copyright office doesn't weigh in on those legal cases but
says it is working on another report that “will turn to the
training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing
considerations, and allocation of any liability.”
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