Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
Texts, screenplays, images and video made with AI: who the author is, what is protected and what is not, how the law differs from Italy and the European Union to the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan and India, what the models' terms say, and what to write in your contracts.
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Contents
Chapter 1 — Who the author is
The principle almost every country shares: only a person is an author. Generated, assisted and composed works, whether a prompt is enough, and how to document your own contribution.
Chapter 2 — Country by country
Italy, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, South Korea and India: laws and court decisions, with a summary table.
Chapter 3 — Texts, screenplays, images, video
What changes for each kind of work, the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA contracts, software, and works made of several parts.
Chapter 4 — How the models differ
What the providers' terms say about who owns the output, commercial use, training on your data and indemnity, plan by plan.
Chapter 5 — Training and opt-out
Whether other people's works may train a model, how to reserve your own, and the court cases in Europe, the United States and Asia.
Chapter 6 — Look-alikes, liability and contracts
When a result resembles an existing work, style versus expression, protecting what copyright does not cover, publishing contracts, platforms and selling generated assets.
Chapter 7 — Disclosing the use of AI
Article 50 of the EU AI Act, providers and deployers, examples of what counts as a deepfake, and the rules of publishing platforms.
Chapter 8 — Real people's faces and voices
Image rights, personal and biometric data, deepfake offences, consent and the laws of the United States.
Chapter 9 — Agency, client and AI provider
Commissioned work: rights of use, exclusivity, the client's materials uploaded to AI services, warranties and disclosure.
Appendix — Bibliography
Every statement is numbered and points to its source: laws, court decisions, the providers' own terms and commentary.
Key points
Only a person can be an author
Copyright protects human creative choices. What an AI produces on its own has no author, and a detailed prompt is usually still an idea.
Composed works can be protected
Selecting, arranging and modifying generated parts — a layout, an edit, a rewrite — can make the whole a protected work, even when its pieces are not.
The answer depends on the country
The same image may be unprotected in the United States, covered for 50 years in the United Kingdom and protected in China.
«Yours» in the terms is not copyright
A provider that assigns you the output only claims nothing itself: whether the result is protected, and whether using it is lawful, are separate questions.
Not protected does not mean free
A generated result can still contain a trademark, a protected character or a real person's face, and can be bound by a contract.
Disclose what can pass for real
From 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act asks whoever publishes a deepfake to say so; platforms such as Amazon KDP ask about generated content too.
The guide is general information, not legal advice. It reports laws, court decisions and providers' terms as of October 2026: they change, so read the current texts and, for a specific project, ask a lawyer.