For the first time, Chinese court rules that AI-generated images can be protected by copyright

For the first time, Chinese court rules that AI-generated images can be protected by copyright

At the end of November 2023, the Beijing Internet Court, a judicial body that deals with cases related to virtual activity, recognized copyright protection for images generated by an artificial intelligence (AI), the first ruling handed down in the country on the subject.

The dispute involved a lawsuit filed in May 2023, when an artist used an AI to create an image of a young Asian woman, which was then posted on her social networks and then reproduced by a third party without permission on another platform. The artist who had guided the AI in creating the image sued the user in question, alleging misuse of the image and that he had also cut out the watermark from his signature, leading the public to mistakenly believe that he was the author of the work.

The Chinese court considered that the AI-generated image involved in the case had human aesthetic preferences and instructions and should therefore be recognized as a work and protected by the Chinese Copyright Law.

The decision stated that from the moment the idea for the image was conceived to its final selection, there was a certain amount of creative involvement and judgment on the part of the artist, such as designing the character presentation, selecting numerous commands for the AI, organizing the order of the commands, defining the relevant parameters and so on. According to the judges, the final images reflected the author’s intellectual investment and therefore appeared as “intellectual achievements”, meeting the requirement of originality. The decision also emphasized that the essential purpose of copyright protection is to encourage creation.

It is important to consider the background to the new Chinese decision. So far, the ruling contrasts with the current position of the US Copyright Office, for example, which considers that AI-generated art with human participation only via prompts (commands/guidance) cannot be protected by copyright, on the grounds that no human creative intervention takes place in this process.

The decision freely translated into English can be accessed via the link: https://cdn.patentlyo.com/media/2023/12/Li-v-Liu-Beijing-Internet-Court-20231127-with-English-Translation.pdf

The US Copyright Office’s policy on the protection of AI-generated works can be found here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2023-03-16/pdf/2023-05321.pdf

Note: For quick release and cost control, this English version is provided by automated translation without human review.