Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get

Copyright protects human creativity, not effort or investment: a quickly written poem can qualify, while years spent compiling factual phone listings cannot. The same principle excludes works made by nonhumans, from a monkey’s selfie to an AI-generated image. Creative prompts and human-authored edits may be protected, and selecting among generated images may earn a narrow claim, but the AI output itself remains available for anyone to use. This creates practical uncertainty in mixed-media works: creators and courts must distinguish which elements came from people and which came from AI.

The clearest way for companies to secure rights over an entire project is to use human artists throughout, prohibit AI use, and keep records. That prospect is valuable to creative workers, though copyright disputes are costly, fact-specific, and difficult to resolve. The piece argues that abolished copyright “formalities” - registration, deposit copies, and notices identifying authors and protected material - make AI-era disputes harder by obscuring who created what. Before the United States adopted the Berne Convention’s approach in 1976, these requirements made ownership and the scope of claims visible, but mistakes could forfeit protection. The Copyright Office’s insistence on human authorship therefore revives the importance of documentation and deliberate effort to obtain copyright, even as the old formalities system is gone.