Plain answers on who owns what you make with AI, what the law actually requires, and how to prove the work is yours.
The Copyright Office says you can't own what you didn't create. If you use a computer program to generate your work, you need to draw a line between your effort and the machine's output. The current c
August 13, 2026If you don't register your work with the Copyright Office, you’re basically fighting for scraps in court. Most creators think copyright protection happens the moment they hit save. You’re right, but t
August 11, 2026The Copyright Office just wants you to tell the truth. When you fill out an application, you see a box labeled "Material Excluded." Most people stare at it like it’s a trap. It is not a trap. It is a
August 9, 2026Before we get into what happened to Sage and Paul Skye Lehrman, one thing needs to be said plainly: neither of these cases is a copyright case. Your voice isn't copyrightable the way a piece of writin
August 9, 2026Doe v. GitHub started in November 2022 as one of the very first AI copyright lawsuits filed anywhere, months before ChatGPT even had its public moment. It's still going, and in February 2026 it landed
August 9, 2026News Corp and Dow Jones filed suit against Perplexity AI in October 2024, and for a while it looked like just another entry on the growing list of publisher-versus-AI-company lawsuits. Then, on August
August 9, 2026On June 24, 2026, a coalition of publishers organized by the News/Media Alliance filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. If that sounds familiar, like a repeat of the New York Times case, look at the
August 9, 2026Meta won its case. That's the headline, and it's true. What gets lost in the headline is that the judge who ruled for Meta also went out of his way to say, in the same opinion, that he expects most fu
August 8, 2026Can AI-generated content be copyrighted? The short answer is: parts of it, sometimes, if a human did enough of the creative work. The long answer is what this guide is for, because "sometimes" is doin
August 8, 2026The US Copyright Office has been unusually direct about AI-assisted work, more direct than most applicants realize until they're staring at a rejected or partially canceled registration. This guide pu
August 8, 2026Proving you're the human author of AI-assisted work is a different problem than being the author. You can genuinely have written every word yourself, made every creative choice, and still lose an argu
August 8, 2026Fifteen lawsuits. Three countries. A $1.5 billion settlement, a $3 billion suit still pending, a Supreme Court cert denial, and a German court that already reached a final answer on a question America
August 8, 2026Ask Midjourney for an image of a lightsaber-wielding animated ogre and you'll probably get something that looks unmistakably like Darth Vader standing next to Shrek. That's the entire lawsuit, more or
August 8, 2026Anthropic already paid $1.5 billion to settle a book-piracy case. Now the music industry wants its turn, using a lot of the same evidence, against the same company, and asking for even more money.
August 8, 2026Andersen v. Stability AI was the first lawsuit of its kind. Artists suing an AI company as a group, arguing their work had been ingested by the millions to build a commercial product that now competes
August 8, 2026Before there was a New York Times lawsuit, before Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement, before almost any of the AI copyright litigation getting attention today, there was Authors Guild v. OpenAI. File
August 8, 2026Every case in this pillar so far involves US courts and US copyright law. GEMA v. OpenAI doesn't, and that's exactly why it's worth understanding. It's the clearest sign yet that the legal fight over
August 8, 2026$1.5 billion. That's the number that made Bartz v. Anthropic the largest copyright settlement in US history, and it's easy to read that headline as "AI training on books is illegal, and it just got ex
August 8, 2026Twenty million chat logs. That's the number at the center of the discovery fight in The New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft, and it tells you something about the scale this case has grown to, more
August 8, 2026You shipped a feature with Copilot's help this morning, merged a PR that Cursor drafted, and pushed a commit under your name. Is any of that actually yours, in the copyright sense? The honest answer i
August 8, 2026You used AI somewhere in writing your book. Maybe it drafted a rough first pass you rewrote from scratch. Maybe you used it to brainstorm plot problems and wrote every word yourself. Maybe you leaned
August 8, 2026Getty Images sued Stability AI on two continents, over two overlapping but distinct legal theories, and got two very different results. Losing the core copyright argument in one court while winning a
August 8, 2026The US Copyright Office doesn't care about your tool. They care about your hand. If you used a machine to generate the expressive parts of your work, you won't get a registration for those parts. Peri
August 7, 2026Machines can’t be authors. The United States Copyright Office says so, and the courts have backed them up every single time. If you feed a prompt into a generator and click a button, you aren’t creati
August 5, 2026You don't lose your copyright just because you typed a prompt into a chatbot. That fear is a myth. People are terrified that using ChatGPT or Claude somehow stains their work, making it public domain
August 3, 2026You don't own the output of your prompts. That’s the hard truth the US Copyright Office keeps hammering home, whether you like it or not. You can type a novel’s worth of instructions into a generator,
August 1, 2026You can't own a computer program’s output. That is the hard line the US Copyright Office draws today, and you have to work around it if you want protection for your story. When you look at how to copy
July 30, 2026Your commit history is a diary, but it isn't a legal deed. You might think that a deep, complex git history proof authorship beyond any doubt, but the Copyright Office sees it differently. They view y
July 28, 2026You don't own a file just because you tagged it with a digital receipt. The tech world is currently obsessed with C2PA, which stands for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Think of
July 26, 2026The law doesn't care what you remember. It cares about what you can prove. When you find yourself in a copyright dispute, your memory of the creative process is useless. Courts ignore your claims abou
July 24, 2026You don’t own what the machine spits out just because you typed a paragraph of instructions. That is the hard truth of the current copyright landscape. You can spend all afternoon crafting the most in
July 22, 2026If you want to own your work, you have to be the one who actually makes it. That sounds simple. But the US Copyright Office is currently turning that simple idea into a massive headache for anyone usi
July 20, 2026The law is currently playing a game of catch-up with your hard drive. While you've been experimenting with prompts, courts have been busy deciding whether your output belongs to you or to the ether. E
July 18, 2026If you feed a machine enough copyrighted music, you eventually get a machine that sounds just like the artists who made the original tracks. That is the core of the current suno ai music copyright law
July 16, 2026The United States Copyright Office doesn't think a machine can be an author. If you type a prompt into Suno or Udio and wait for the computer to spit out a three-minute pop song, you're out of luck. T
July 14, 2026Copyright is automatic, but an unregistered copyright is almost impossible to enforce. Why you register, what it unlocks, and the current cost and timeline.
June 10, 2026After Zarya, after Theatre D'opera Spatial, after years of refusals making headlines, people assumed the Copyright Office had effectively closed the door on
June 8, 2026Article 50 of the EU AI Act demands AI transparency by August 2026. It is not a copyright authorship test. Why your enterprise needs both records.
June 8, 2026C2PA proves where an asset came from. Copyrightable proves a human authored it. Two different questions, and why you probably want both.
June 6, 2026Most AI copyright fights are arguments about degree. How much did the human do? Was it enough? Thaler v. Perlmutter is not that kind of case. It's the one that
June 6, 2026Cursor's been carrying half your codebase. Right before a funding round, a fair question: do you actually own this code? The honest answer.
June 4, 2026Jason Allen did the work. Nobody disputes that. To make Theatre D'opera Spatial he ran at least 624 prompt revisions through Midjourney, then took the result
June 4, 2026Strip away the noise. Here's exactly what the US Copyright Office requires to protect AI-assisted work, with the 2025 cases that back it up.
June 2, 2026The most useful AI copyright case isn't the one everyone calls a loss. It's the one where the Copyright Office said yes and no in the same letter. Kris
June 2, 2026You coaxed an image out of Midjourney over forty prompts. Can you stop someone from stealing it? The honest answer, grounded in copyright law.
May 31, 2026Publishers can reject your book for almost anything, including AI use. The deeper question is whether you can prove human authorship, and how to document it.
May 29, 2026You typed three words into Cursor and it wrote 200 lines. Do you own it? The honest answer, grounded in what the US Copyright Office actually requires.
May 27, 2026