This week, the Beijing Internet Court made a key ruling in a copyright lawsuit involving the copyright in an AI generated image of a woman that was made by Li, a creator who used Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generator.
According to South China Morning Post, the Beijing Internet Court found that Li satisfied originality in the creation of the AI generated work:
The “originality” of the image in dispute means that Li had continuously added prompts and repeatedly adjusted the parameters to come up with a picture that reflected his “aesthetic choice and personalised judgment.”
“To encourage creation is the essential purpose of the copyright system,” the court said in the document. “In the backdrop of [the rise of AI] technology, as long as an AI-generated image reflects the original intellectual investment of a human being, it should be considered a work that is protected by copyright laws.”
South China Morning Post summary of part of the Beijing Internet Court’s decision
The Beijing court ruled in favor of the plaintiff Li and ordered the defendant Liu to pay US$70.43 and 50 yuan in court costs, and issue a public apology.
So far, the U.S. Copyright Office has taken a different approach, rejecting the copyrightability of AI-generated images. I disagree with the Office’s position, and have written an article explaining why prompt-engineered images should qualify as works of authorship as long as the human creator makes a minimally creative selection or arrangement of elements. For the shorter version of my reasoning, I submitted a Comment to the U.S. Copyright Office as well.