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The intersection of AI and copyright law is a rapidly evolving landscape, with new developments and interpretations emerging regularly. The resources provided below offer valuable insights into the current state of AI copyright laws and policies, as well as ongoing discussions and updates as this field continues to change.
Since launching an initiative in early 2023, the Copyright Office has been examining the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI), including the scope of copyright in AI-generated works and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. After hosting public listening sessions and webinars, the Office published a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register in August 2023, which received over 10,000 comments by December 2023.
The Office has published two of three reports addressing legal and policy issues related to artificial intelligence. The first report published in 2024 addresses unauthorized digital replicas created by AI. Although copyright law primarily protects creative content used for the input of an AI system, the report cites common law right of publicity/privacy protections for an individual’s voice, image, and likeness during their lifetime; with additional postmortem protections in some states. The second report published in January of 2025 addresses questions of copyright eligibility for contributions to works made by humans who have used AI tools in the creation of their work. The report states that input created by humans (including in some cases prompts), and identifiable human created elements in an AI generated work have copyright protections in some instances, which should be examined by the courts on a case-by-case basis.
The Copyright Office issues this statement of policy to clarify its practices for examining and registering works that contain material generated by the use of artificial intelligence technology.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT generally raise two kinds of copyright questions. The first is often referred to as the "input question" and has to do with training AI tools using in-copyright works, which are often scraped from the internet without permission from creators. Some copyright holders have claimed that using their work in this way infringes their copyrights, and some have sued the makers of AI tools. AI makers argue that copyright's fair use doctrine permits this use, and most legal scholars seem to agree that fair use has an important role to play. The second set of questions is often characterized as addressing "outputs" of AI, and asks whether the products of generative AI tools are (a) infringing the copyrights of their inputs, and (b) eligible for copyright protection as works of authorship in their own right. The US Copyright Office has taken the position that the Constitution requires human authorship for copyright, and it has denied registration to works alleged to be authored entirely by artificial intelligence tools. For works containing a mix of human- and AI-authored works, the Office will register copyrights only for the human-authored portions. These stances are being tested in court, with the August 2023 decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter validating the Office's approach to purely AI-authored works.
Brandon Butler. (2023, May 8). What AI can teach us about copyright and fair use. Freethink. https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/what-ai-can-teach-us-about-copyright-and-fair-use
Congressional Research Service. (2023). Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence | U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). Retrieved August 19, 2024, from https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence. (2024, August 4). Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence
Henderson, P., Xuechen L., Jurafsky, D., Tatsunori, H., Lemley, M.A. & Liang, P. (2023). Foundation Models and Fair Use. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15715.
Legal Sidebari. (2023). CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress. Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10922
Lemley, M. (2023). Fair Learning. 44 Tex. L. Rev. 743. https://texaslawreview.org/fair-learning/
O’Reilly, T. (2023, April 14). You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand. O’Reilly Media. https://www.oreilly.com/content/you-cant-regulate-what-you-dont-understand-2/
Sag, M. (2023) Copyright Safety for Generative AI. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY, May 4, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4438593.
Samuelson, P. (2023). Generative AI meets copyright. Science, 381(6654), 158–161. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi0656
Samuelson, P. (2023). Legal Challenges to Generative AI, Part I. Communications of the ACM 66, no. 7 (June 22, 2023): 20–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3597151.
Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 22-1564 (BAH) (D.D.C. August 18, 2023) https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956/gov.uscourts.dcd.243956.24.0.pdf.
United States Copyright Office. Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 1: Digital Replicas. U.S. Government Publishing Office, July 2024 https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-1-Digital-Replicas-Report.pdf
United States Copyright Office. Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2: Copyrightability. U.S. Government Publishing Office, January 2025 https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Part I — Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law. (2023, May 15). House Judiciary Committee Republicans. http://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/artificial-intelligence-and-intellectual-property-part-i
Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – Part II: Copyright | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. (2023, July 12). https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/artificial-intelligence-and-intellectual-property_part-ii-copyright
Dai, Y. (n.d.). Research Guides: Machines and Society: Copyright, Authorship, and Governance. Retrieved August 18, 2023, from https://guides.nyu.edu/data/ai-governance
Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2024, from https://hbr.org/2023/04/generative-ai-has-an-intellectual-property-problem