AI images should be copyrightable
- Posted by Michał ‘mina86’ Nazarewicz on 30th of January 2025
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In September 2022, ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’, a work submitted by Jason Allen, won the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s annual fine art competition in the digital art category. What made the success noteworthy was that the image had been AI-generated. Mr Allen eventually tried to register the work with the US Copyright Office but his attempts turned out fruitless. In September 2023 the Office refused his registration.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. I wasn’t that invested in the consideration of what kind of ‘two-dimensional artworks’ are protected by copyright and, more notably, I somewhat agreed with the decision. Perhaps the prompt was protected, but if only minor manual edits were made to the image, it felt like a stretch to say the image as a whole could be covered by copyright law.