Copyright

In January 2025, the United States Copyright Office released a report declaring that they will now grant copyright registration to work that used generative AI to assist in the works creation. This does not mean that someone can receive copyright protection for a work that was completely done by AI. The author must still be a human and they must show evidence that they had substantial influence over the final product besides giving simple feedback and instructions. 

This landmark decision means that works such as Zarya of the Dawn by Kris Kashtanova (a graphic novel created with Midjourney, a generative AI, using the original story from Kashtanva) could possibly receive copyright protection. Much like a camera, photoshop or other technology that can be used to enhance someone's creative idea, artificial intelligence can now openly be used as such.  

What about in cases of 'regurgitation'?

Regurgitation is what AI companies refer to what happens when a system produces a product that has substantial similarity to a protected work. This can occur due to AI systems using crawlers to move through the internet as a means to teach the system, however, this causes copyrighted works to be consumed often without the original creator's knowledge or permission.   

Luckily, if an AI produces a work that is substantially similar in protected expression to a work that was ingested by the system, that new work infringes the copyright of the original and as long as the original work was registered prior to the infringement, the copyright owner can bring an infringement action for statutory damages against the AI provider AND the user who prompted the AI to produce the substantially similar work. 

According to current precedents, it’s Fair Use to teach a learning language using readily available information online even if that material is protected. Arguably, this came about due to the two lawsuits brought by the authors guild against Hathitrust and Google in 2014 and 2015. In both cases, the US court of appeals affirmed that mass digitization of a large volume of copyrighted books in order to distill and reveal new information about the books was protected by Fair Use doctrine.

Around this same time, web crawlers were deemed to be Fair Use. If you are unfamiliar with the term web crawlers or crawlers for short, they are programs that “crawl” through the internet recording information. Archives and libraries frequently adopt such programs to help document certain areas of interest. Often when you hear about discourse on Twitter, now X, and they say the tweet is now deleted they have a copy of the post because a crawler was on the website/page documenting activity. 

There is discourse that these rulings are inadequate and do not take into account the advancement of artificial intelligence, which has resulted in a plethora of court cases. You can keep up with active lawsuits on this topic on Case Tracker.