IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: An AI-assisted work is cleared for registration by the Copyright Office, (Feb 19, 2025)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

But only the human selection and arrangement of the AI-generated portions will earn protection.

The Copyright Office has permitted the registration of the copyright in an artificial intelligence-assisted artwork, the creator of the work has announced. The successful registration of the work, describe by its creator as a “landmark ruling,” appears to follow the Office’s long-established doctrine that the human contributions to an AI-assisted work may be registered even if the portions of the work actually created by AI software cannot.

The work, entitled A Single Piece of Cheese, was created by Kent Keirsey, the CEO and founder of an AI company named Invoke. The company, according to its website, promises open-source code that enables users to “create images with the precision and control that professionals require.” The company explains that it was able to secure copyright protection “by proactively combining human creativity with AI-assisted image generation, and by documenting the creative techniques that Keirsey used inside the Invoke platform.” The creation process for the work is documented at this online video.

As IP Law Daily has covered extensively, the Copyright Office has repeatedly addressed the question of AI-generated artworks. In a major report issued in January—one day before its approval of the registration of A Single Piece of Cheese—copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material or material where there is “insufficient human control over the expressive elements. But the Office also made clear in the report that “the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.” The successful registration appears to have followed the framework set out by the Office in that the company claimed rights only in “the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the inpainted components of the composite image, but not the individual AI-generated inpainted segments.”

The registration comes in the wake of many other unsuccessful attempts at registration by the authors of AI-assisted artwork. In recent years, the Office has refused to register AI-generated works by a noted inventor, a comic book illustrator, an intellectual property attorney, and even the winner of the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s “digital art/digitally manipulated photography” entry. A Washington, D.C. federal court affirmed the Office’s rejection of the inventor’s entry, while a lawsuit brought by the putative author of the Colorado state fair entry is now pending before a federal court in that state. The Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, recently filed her answer in that lawsuit.

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