Photo provided by DepositPhotos
The legal ground beneath AI-generated images has moved repeatedly over the past 18 months, with three U.S. Copyright Office reports, a UK High Court ruling, and a fast-approaching European Union deadline reshaping how businesses can claim ownership of, or be held liable for, the visuals they generate and publish.
The shifts arrive as small businesses, marketers, and independent creators have come to rely on generative tools for everyday visual content, often under the assumption that a generated image belongs to the person who prompted it. According to recent guidance from the U.S. Copyright Office, that assumption is wrong.
In Part 2 of its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, published in January 2025, the Office concluded that prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Works that combine human creativity with AI-generated material can still be protected, the Office said, but only the human contributions are eligible. Copyrightability, it added, is decided case by case.
People are also reading…
Part 3 of the report, released in pre-publication form in May 2025, addressed the separate question of whether using copyrighted works to train AI models qualifies as fair use. The Office concluded that some training uses will, and some will not. It declined to draw a single line, leaving the issue unsettled.
The human-authorship requirement was reinforced in Thaler v. Perlmutter, in which the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires a human author. The Supreme Court declined to review the case in March 2026. Because all challenges to Copyright Office registration decisions are heard in the D.C. Circuit, the ruling applies nationwide.
Across the Atlantic, the UK High Court issued its decision in Getty Images v. Stability AI on November 4, 2025. The court rejected most of Getty's copyright claims, though it found a narrower instance of trademark infringement involving reproduced watermarks. The decision did not address whether AI training itself is infringing; it concluded only that the model weights are not "infringing copies" under UK law. Getty has indicated it will carry the findings of fact into its separate U.S. case.
A further set of obligations takes effect in the European Union on August 2, 2026, when Article 50 of the EU AI Act begins to apply. Providers of generative AI systems will be required to mark their outputs in a machine-readable format. Deployers will be required to disclose deepfakes and AI-generated text published on matters of public interest. The requirements extend to non-EU businesses whose content reaches European audiences. A Code of Practice on the marking and labeling of AI-generated content remains in draft form, with a second version published on March 3, 2026 and a final version expected in June.
The rulings and the new EU rules have narrowed what businesses can safely assume about AI imagery. Prompting an image does not make the prompter its owner. Downloading an image does not necessarily clear it for commercial use. In Europe, AI-generated visuals used in public communications may also carry a disclosure obligation regardless of where they were produced.
Licensing terms vary substantially across platforms. Some terms remain ambiguous on commercial use; others restrict it. A smaller number of platforms, including those that offer AI image tools with explicit commercial-use licensing, release outputs under CC0 public-domain terms with no attribution required. Such terms address the licensing question but do not affect the underlying authorship rule established by the Copyright Office, which continues to apply at the point of registration.
The legal picture is still uneven. U.S. courts may have closed the door on copyright for AI-only outputs, the UK has narrowed the scope of training-related claims, and the EU is preparing to impose disclosure rules that reach beyond its borders. Further U.S. litigation, including the American arm of the Getty case, is expected in the coming year.
