Part 2 of the US Copyright Office’s “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence” report, released on January 29, 2025, tackled the question of whether AI-generated material can be protected by copyright. Its answer drew a firm line grounded in the long-standing human-authorship requirement: copyright protects only works of human creativity, so material generated entirely by an AI system, without sufficient human control over the expressive elements, is not copyrightable.
The report concluded that prompts alone generally do not give a user enough control over the output to make them the author, because the AI fills in the expressive details in ways the user cannot dictate or predict. However, the Office said that works incorporating AI-generated material can still be protected where a human contributes sufficient original authorship - for example, by creatively selecting, arranging, and modifying AI outputs, or by inputting their own copyrightable work into the system. In those cases, copyright covers the human-authored contributions, not the raw AI-generated parts. Importantly, the Office found that existing copyright law is flexible enough to handle these situations and that no new legislation is needed to address copyrightability.
The report built on the Office’s earlier decisions, including its partial cancellation of the registration for the AI-illustrated comic “Zarya of the Dawn” and its refusal to register the AI image “Theatre D’opera Spatial.”
Why business readers should care: companies producing marketing copy, art, or software with generative AI cannot assume the output is theirs to own and enforce. To secure copyright, a human must contribute meaningful creative work - and that contribution should be documented.