The U.S. Copyright Office has released Part 2 of its report on artificial intelligence, dealing with the legal and policy issues pertaining to copyright and generative AI. The two main takeaways are that legal questions concerning copyrightability and AI can be settled using existing federal law, requiring no legislative change. Also, “where AI ‘merely assists’ an author in the creative process, it does not change the copyrightability of the output.” Additionally, it reaffirms that any work created entirely by prompts (content “entirely generated by AI”) cannot be protected by copyright.

The determination that AI-assisted work can be copyrighted “clears the way for continued adoption of AI in post production, where it has become increasingly common,” writes Variety, using the example of Hungarian-language dialogue enhancement in “The Brutalist.”

The findings in the 52-page report pertain to the intellectual property authorship laws in U.S. Code Title 17, covering authorship endeavors — from fine arts to books and music. It stops short of assuring complete protection for AI-assisted work, meaning there will still be gray areas where authorship will be determined by the courts.

“The document concludes that while generative AI may be a new technology, existing copyright principles can apply without changes to the law — and these principles offer limited protection for many kinds of work,” summarizes The Verge.

“The new guidelines say that AI prompts currently don’t offer enough control to ‘make users of an AI system the authors of the output,’” The Verge continues, noting “AI systems themselves can’t hold copyrights.”

The copyright office concludes that “the issue is the degree of human control, rather than the predictability of the outcome,” using the example of Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings as an example of protected works that contain serendipitous elements.

“There’s a difference between AI being used as a tool to assist a creative work and ‘AI as a stand-in for human creativity,’ and the office says that further analysis is warranted,” but it also assures that “creatives that using AI to outline a book or come up with song ideas shouldn’t impact the ability to copyright the final human-produced work, since the author is simply ‘referencing, but not incorporating, the output,’” The Verge reports.

The report diverges from the office’s initial guidance of two years ago, which emphasized that “work created by a machine is not eligible for copyright protection,” with copyright registrants “directed to disclaim any AI-generated material,” says Variety, emphasizing that the Motion Picture Association “took issue with that provision, saying it was ‘misguided’ and that it would prove burdensome and unworkable in the context of films and TV shows.”

The report represents a positive outcome for the studios, whose business model relies on strong copyright protections, since it says human expression that merely contains AI elements qualifies for protection. “It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements,” the USCO explains in a news announcement.

The USCO’s AI report is being published in three parts. Part one, published in July 2024, addresses the topic of digital replicas. Part 3 examines the training of AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and allocation of potential liability. To learn more, visit www.copyright.gov/ai.