East China court rules that AI-generated image should have copyright protection

A court in eastern China’s Jiangsu province has ruled in favour of copyright protection for artificial intelligence-generated content, marking the second case of its kind in mainland China as the technology continues to raise questions about intellectual property rights.

In a ruling made public on Friday, the Changshu People’s Court said that a picture generated with the AI tool Midjourney qualified as a copyright-protected work for its originality, as the human user “demonstrated unique selection and arrangement through modifying the prompt texts and refining image details using editing software”.

In early 2023, the plaintiff, surnamed Lin, used Midjourney to create an image depicting a heart-shaped balloon and posted it on social media. Lin later sued two companies for using the design without permission in social media posts.

In its ruling, the court ordered the defendants to issue a public apology and pay Lin 10,000 yuan (US$1,380) in damages, according to an article published by the court on Friday.

The court was the second in mainland China to weigh in on a heated debate about whether AI-generated content should be protected by copyright laws.

The first ruling came in late 2023, when the Beijing Internet Court determined that an AI-generated image was an artwork protected by copyright laws in an intellectual property dispute.

The Beijing court concluded that a picture of a young Asian woman, generated by Stability AI’s text-to-image software Stable Diffusion, should be considered a copyrighted artwork based on the “originality” and intellectual input of its human creator.