Copyright

The US has the clearest position of any country here, and it comes down to one rule: copyright needs a human author.

Purely AI-generated work: not protected. If a piece of film, music or text was generated by AI with no meaningful human control over what it actually expresses, nobody owns copyright in it — which also means anyone can copy it.

Prompts alone are not authorship. The US Copyright Office treats a prompt as an instruction — like telling a hired artist what to paint. It doesn’t matter how long or detailed the prompt is, or how many times you re-rolled: one well-known application was refused after more than 600 prompts. Effort doesn’t count; control over the expression does, and each case is judged on its own facts.

AI-assisted work: the human parts are protected — your own writing, artwork or footage visible in the result; your creative selection and arrangement of AI outputs; and your substantial edits.

Registration: copyright is automatic, but if you register a work containing more than a tiny amount of AI material, you must say so and limit your claim to the human-made parts.

Sources: US Copyright Office, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability” (Jan 2025) and 2023 registration guidance; Thaler v. Perlmutter, D.C. Circuit (Mar 2025), Supreme Court declined review (Mar 2026); Théâtre D’opéra Spatial refusal (2023); Zarya of the Dawn (2023).

The UK is one of the few countries whose law, on paper, can protect a work with no human author at all.

Purely AI-generated work: the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has a special category for “computer-generated” works. For these, the author is “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken” — often read as the person who set up and ran the system. Protection lasts 50 years from the year the work was made, instead of life plus 70.

The catch: that rule was written in the 1980s, long before generative AI. No UK court has tested it against a modern AI tool. In March 2026 the government proposed removing this protection for wholly computer-generated works, while keeping protection for works made with AI help. That change has not been passed — for now the rule is still on the books, but treat it as shaky ground.

AI-assisted work: protected in the ordinary way where your own creative choices shape the result. Registration: none — copyright is automatic.

Sources: Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, ss. 9(3), 12(7), 178; UK Government report on copyright and AI (Mar 2026); THJ Systems v Sheridan [2023] EWCA Civ 1354.

There is no EU-wide law that deals directly with copyright in AI output. Instead, one test runs across all member states: a work is protected only if it is the “author’s own intellectual creation” — the result of a human making free and creative choices and giving the work their personal touch.

Purely AI-generated work: output produced by AI with little or no human shaping is unlikely to be protected anywhere in the EU, because there is no human intellectual creation in it.

AI-assisted work: protected to the extent that your creative choices shape the result. The author is the human creator, never the tool. Registration: none.

One separate point: the EU’s AI Act adds labelling duties — some AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, must be disclosed as AI-made. That’s about honesty to the audience, not about who owns the work.

Sources: European Parliamentary Research Service briefing (Dec 2025); CJEU, Infopaq (C-5/08) and Painer (C-145/10); AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Art. 50.

Canadian originality means a human exercising “skill and judgment.” After a public consultation on AI and copyright, the federal government reported that the case law points to authorship belonging to a human who does that. On that reading, work generated by AI alone would not be protected, while work where you genuinely directed, selected and shaped the result could be.

The wrinkle: in 2021 the Canadian Intellectual Property Office registered a work that listed an AI tool as a co-author alongside its human creator. A public-interest clinic has asked the Federal Court to strike that registration out, and the case is still pending. Until a court decides, nobody can give you a certain answer for Canada.

Registration: copyright is automatic; registration with CIPO is optional.

Sources: Government of Canada, “What we heard” report on generative AI and copyright (2025); CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada (SCC, 2004); CIPO registration No. 1188619 (2021) and its Federal Court challenge (2024).

Australian law requires an original work to come from a human author’s independent intellectual effort. Courts applied that idea to machines long before generative AI: in 2010 the Federal Court refused copyright in directories produced mostly by an automated process.

Purely AI-generated work: not protected. Australia has no equivalent of the UK’s “computer-generated work” rule to fall back on.

AI-assisted work: your own creative contribution can be protected — but exactly how much human co-creation is enough has not been tested in court for generative AI yet.

Registration: there is none — copyright in Australia is automatic. The government consulted on AI and copyright reform through 2025–26, but nothing new has been adopted yet.

Sources: Copyright Act 1968 (Cth); IceTV v Nine Network (HCA, 2009); Telstra v Phone Directories Company (FCAFC, 2010).

Japanese law protects a “work” — something that creatively expresses a person’s thoughts or feelings. An AI is not a person and cannot be an author.

Purely AI-generated work: if AI produces something on its own, with no creative contribution from a person, it is not a protected work.

AI-assisted work: the Agency for Cultural Affairs says the line is whether you used AI as a tool and made a real creative contribution — instructions that shape the actual expression (not just the idea), plus your own creative edits, additions and composition. Merely picking one output, or nudging settings, usually isn’t enough by itself; the whole process is looked at.

Registration: not needed. Two honest caveats: the Agency’s guidance is not legally binding, and Japanese courts have barely touched these questions. (Japan’s Article 30-4 broadly allows using works to train AI — that’s about making AI, not owning what it makes.)

Sources: Copyright Act of Japan, Arts. 2(1)(i), 30-4; Agency for Cultural Affairs, “General Understanding on AI and Copyright in Japan” (Mar 2024) and “Checklist & Guidance” (Jul 2024).

China’s Copyright Law never mentions AI, so the courts are deciding case by case — and they have not all gone the same way.

The landmark case: in November 2023 the Beijing Internet Court protected an image made with Stable Diffusion and treated the user as its author, because his prompts, settings and repeated adjustments showed his own intellectual input and personal expression. The court was clear that the AI model itself cannot be an author — and neither can the company that built the model. It also said people should label AI-generated content as such.

But: an earlier Beijing decision refused protection to a report generated purely by software, and in 2025 two courts in Jiangsu split — one protected an AI image, the other refused because the creator couldn’t show their creative process. In September 2026 the Supreme People’s Court issued guidance on AI disputes that deliberately left the copyright question open. So there is no national rule yet.

The practical read: an AI-assisted work stands a real chance of protection if you can show it reflects your creative choices — keeping records of your prompts, settings and edits genuinely helps here.

Sources: Li v. Liu, Beijing Internet Court (Nov 2023); Tencent v. Yingxun (Shenzhen, 2019); Feilin v. Baidu (Beijing, 2019); Supreme People’s Court, Opinion on AI dispute trials (Sept 2026).

The Copyright Act 1957 says that for a computer-generated work, the author is “the person who causes the work to be created”, and the author is normally the first owner of the copyright. An AI system itself cannot be an author — it is not a legal person.

The muddle: in 2020 the Copyright Office registered an artwork, Suryast, naming an AI tool as co-author next to its human creator — a world first. The Office then issued a notice questioning whether the AI could be an author at all. The creator objected, nothing was finally decided, and the registration reportedly still stands. More recently, in a case involving another AI system (DABUS), the Copyright Office refused to list the AI as author and treated the human behind it as the author instead.

Bottom line: unsettled. A government committee is still working on the rules for AI output, and no court has given a final answer. If you “cause the work to be created” with real creative direction, you have a reasonable argument that you are its author — but today it remains an argument, not a guarantee.

Sources: Copyright Act 1957 (India), ss. 2(d)(vi), 17; Suryast registration (2020) and withdrawal notice; DABUS proceedings (reported 2026); DPIIT committee working papers (2025).