--- title: Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you... description: AI-generated output itself cannot be copyrighted in the US, because copyright protects only human creativity, not labor or machine output. The Copyright Office... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/copyright-office-is-restoring-copyright-to-something-you-have-to-work-to-get-tjgzkwtt9 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get | daily.dev og:description: AI-generated output itself cannot be copyrighted in the US, because copyright protects only human creativity, not labor or machine output. The Copyright Office... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/copyright-office-is-restoring-copyright-to-something-you-have-to-work-to-get-tjgzkwtt9 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/TJGzKwtT9.png og:image:alt: Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 17 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary AI-generated output itself cannot be copyrighted in the US, because copyright protects only human creativity, not labor or machine output. The Copyright Office treats AI like the monkey in the famous monkey-selfie case: no human author, no copyright. A sufficiently creative prompt can be copyrighted even though the resulting image stays in the public domain. Human edits to AI output, or creative selection among many AI outputs, can also create a 'thin' copyright. This pushes companies using AI toward strict internal record-keeping, tracking exactly which pixels, words or notes came from a human versus an AI, since the 1976 Copyright Act's abolition of registration formalities already made proving authorship hard, and statutory damages up to $150,000 per work require registration. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### can I copyright an image generated by an AI model like Midjourney or DALL-E in the US No, the US Copyright Office refuses copyright protection to AI-generated images themselves because copyright requires human authorship, not just labor or investment. However, a sufficiently creative text prompt used to generate the image can itself be copyrighted, even though the resulting image remains in the public domain and can be freely copied by anyone. _Developers building AI image tools can track how copyright rules evolve for generative output on daily.dev._ ### what is the legal basis for denying copyright to AI-generated works in the US US copyright law requires works to show human authorship, a principle reinforced by the monkey selfie copyright dispute, where a macaque's self-taken photo was ruled ineligible for copyright because monkeys are not human. The Copyright Office and courts, including the Ninth Circuit, apply the same logic to AI: an algorithm is 'even less human than a monkey,' so its output cannot be copyrighted. _Teams weighing AI-assisted content pipelines can follow copyright precedent like this on daily.dev._ ### how can a company make AI-assisted creative work eligible for copyright protection A company can secure copyright by making creative human edits to AI output, where only the edited portions become copyrighted, or by using 'thin' copyright through selecting a favorite among many AI-generated options, though that protection is harder to defend. The most reliable approach is a no-AI policy using only human-created work from end to end, tracking exactly which elements were human versus AI-generated. _Developers documenting AI versus human contributions in their products can track this guidance on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 35 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-01). **TL;DR:** Discussion centers on the legal nuance of where human creativity ends and AI machine output begins, with most agreement that US copyright law (per Feist and the Constitution) requires human authorship, though there's debate on how to draw lines around prompts, editing, and compilers. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 60% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Several commenters agree the ruling correctly limits copyright's scope rather than expanding it further. - Some see a workable compromise where human-authored prompt elements that survive into the output remain protected. **The pushback** - Many argue it's unclear how to legally distinguish AI-generated work from other mechanical/digital tools like GPU rendering or compilers. - Some worry the record-keeping burden this creates will mainly benefit corporations with legal resources, disadvantaging individual creators. - One commenter cites a contrasting court case where AI was treated as an author to shield a company from liability, suggesting inconsistent treatment of AI authorship across courts. - Doubts raised about whether prompt-based copyright is meaningfully different from just owning a 'thin' sliver of protection while the actual image stays public domain. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters mostly debate technical and legal line-drawing around human vs. AI vs. mechanical authorship, with general but not universal agreement that the legal reasoning described is sound. **Hottest debate:** Where exactly the line falls between a prompt being 'creative enough' to copyright versus being indistinguishable from deterministic tools like compilers or rendering engines. **Open questions** - How will courts or regulators draw a consistent distinction between AI-generated and tool/GPU-generated creative works? - Does extensive human iteration with an AI chatbot (e.g., coding over many months) count as sufficient human authorship? - Will the record-keeping burden effectively make copyright protection accessible mainly to well-resourced companies rather than individuals? **Highlights** > > AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away I don't find this line of thought very convincing. The more detailed the prompt is, the more control the author exercises over the result. A sufficiently detailed prompt may become indistingushable from source code, because it specifies the desired result so precisely that it acts like source code for a compiler. Compilers, too, are not necessarily deterministic. Compilers may have a lot of freedom in how they translate the source code into machine instructions, but this does not break the connection with the original human intellectual effort and the result remains copyrightable. There should be a difference between asking AI to "draw a funny picture of a donkey", and spending a month iteratively refining your prompt. > — [mopsi on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319077) > The article is just restating US copyright law for people who don't know it. The title indicates a recent change in policy, and there hasn't been one. Now, this is US law. Much of the world does have "sweat of the brow" copyright. But the US does not. See "Feist vs. Rural Telephone". There must be human creativity because the US constitution reads "(Congress shall have the power) To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That limits the power of Congress to change this. So a lot of things are uncopyrightable in the US. Feist is the big case, and it was about telephone directories. No copyright. Useful objects are not copyrightable, which is why there are third party auto parts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are databases of facts. Nor are pictures of public domain art. Nor is automotive sheet metal, despite lobbying by automakers. That's what leads to AI-generated content not being copyrightable. Model weights don't seem to be copyrightable either. > — [Animats on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318979) > How does this mesh with this, where the court decided to declare AIs as authors and originators of copyright, just to make sure billionaire companies like Microsoft avoid liability to programmers they copied from? https://www.courthousenews.com/coders-lose-appeal-in-copyrig... Obviously courts will cheat, or should I say "keep cheating", until the output of AI models is covered by copyright while the input is not, because if AI output isn't covered, then most tech companies have nothing of value in their entire AI investment. Anything to cheat individuals out of their rights into the deep pockets of billionaire companies. > — [spwa4 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318853) > > Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation. > That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for. Assuming this happens, wouldn't this mean that copyright becomes significantly less useful for people who aren't corporations and don't have the legal, financial, and administrative resources to produce this kind of bookkeeping? > — [spijdar on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319035) > Hah, this triggers my pet peeve about IP for software: Copyright for code is a category error. Copyright very explicitly does NOT cover functional aspects, only creative expression. But the value of software is not in the expressive aspects of the code that generates it, the value is in the functionality it provides. And this is the exact thing that copyright does NOT protect! Like, literally, we're protecting the fact that we used a for-loop instead of a while-loop to do a useful thing, not the useful thing itself. This is why rewriting enough code is sufficient to bypass all copyright protection, as the recent AI rewrites have shown. This was always a huge legislative hack, rightfully controversial at the time it happened, but legislators didn't want to bother figuring out a proper IP regime for software -- maybe something between copyright and patents -- so they shoehorned code into copyright. Google v Oracle was trivial to decide, but it got decided the wrong way. Because it became a trial around laws based on an ill-founded legislative hack and the decades of flawed case-law it spawned. Stepping back, it is very clear that Sun spent billions making a very useful thing and Google co-opted it for its own uses without recompense because they bet (correctly) that they could legally get away with it. It is somewhat analogous to what the AI companies are doing with all the code and data out there. Funny that people are unhappy about THAT but cheered when Google did it to Sun / Oracle. I wonder what changed ;-) > — [keeda on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320875) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50318018) · 39 points · 35 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The copyright problem with AI-generated code](https://daily.dev/posts/the-copyright-problem-with-ai-generated-code-bouenpdvv) · All Things Open · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Who Owns the Code Claude Wrote?](https://daily.dev/posts/who-owns-the-code-claude-wrote--jw20orboj) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [SCOTUS Declines to Hear LLM-Backed AI Case Regarding Copyright](https://daily.dev/posts/scotus-declines-to-hear-llm-backed-ai-case-regarding-copyright-mdh1hhlqp) · Software Freedom Conservancy · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI And The Ship of Theseus](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-and-the-ship-of-theseus-pkcywq7xd) · Armin Ronacher · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [Lords warn AI copyright changes could harm creative sector](https://daily.dev/posts/lords-warn-ai-copyright-changes-could-harm-creative-sector-noarm4zva) · The Register · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#genai](https://daily.dev/tags/genai) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/copyright-office-is-restoring-copyright-to-something-you-have-to-work-to-get-tjgzkwtt9) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/copyright-office-is-restoring-copyright-to-something-you-have-to-work-to-get-tjgzkwtt9","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/copyright-office-is-restoring-copyright-to-something-you-have-to-work-to-get-tjgzkwtt9"},"datePublished":"2026-10-31T19:50:06.568Z","dateModified":"2026-10-31T19:51:01.080Z","description":"AI-generated output itself cannot be copyrighted in the US, because copyright protects only human creativity, not labor or machine output. 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