Who Owns AI-Generated Content? Human Authorship Still Controls, and Documenting the Creation Process Is Critical | Polsinelli
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/who-owns-ai-generated-content-human-1509048/
Publish Date: 2026-05-13 23:45:00
Source Domain: www.jdsupra.com
Key Takeaways
- Copyright law’s existing framework still governs AI-generated outputs: originality, human authorship and fixation remain the core principles.
- In 2025, the D.C. Circuit confirmed that the Copyright Act requires human authorship and does not permit copyright registration for works generated autonomously by AI.
- The Copyright Office has taken the same position: AI-assisted works may be protectable, but purely AI-generated material, or material reflecting insufficient human control over expressive elements, is not.
- For businesses, the practical question is not whether AI may be used to create content — it may. The question is whether the business can identify and document enough human-authored expression to support ownership, registration and enforcement.
Businesses across industries now use generative AI to draft advertising and website text, create images and presentations, generate software code and develop product concepts. As that use becomes more common, so does an increasingly important question: who, if anyone, owns the output?
The answer begins with familiar copyright doctrine. Section 102(a) protects only “original works of authorship,” and the Supreme Court has long held that originality requires independent creation plus at least a modicum of creativity.1 Copyright also depends on authorship, which the Court has described as the person “to whom anything owes its origin.”2 In the AI context, that makes human authorship the central issue.
Human Authorship Still Controls
The clearest recent appellate authority is Thaler v. Perlmutter. There, registration was sought for a visual work wholly generated by AI. The D.C. Circuit affirmed the refusal to register, holding that “the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.”3 The court emphasized that authors are central to the statutory scheme and relied on Sections 102(a) and 201(a).
The Copyright Office’s…
