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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Copyright Office
37 CFR Part 202
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by
Artificial Intelligence
AGENCY: U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress.
ACTION: Statement of policy.
SUMMARY: The Copyright Office issues this statement of policy to clarify its practices
for examining and registering works that contain material generated by the use of
artificial intelligence technology.
DATES: This statement of policy is effective [INSERT DATE OF PUBLICATION IN
THE FEDERAL REGISTER].
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Rhea Efthimiadis, Assistant to the
General Counsel, by email at [email protected] or telephone at 202-707-8350.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
I. Background
The Copyright Office (the “Office”) is the Federal agency tasked with
administering the copyright registration system, as well as advising Congress, other
agencies, and the Federal judiciary on copyright and related matters.1 Because the Office
has overseen copyright registration since its origins in 1870, it has developed substantial
experience and expertise regarding “the distinction between copyrightable and
noncopyrightable works.”2 The Office is empowered by the Copyright Act to establish
1 See 17 U.S.C. 408 (copyright registration requires delivering deposit, application, and fee to Copyright
Office), 701(a) (all administrative functions and duties set out in Title 17 are the responsibility of the
Register of Copyrights), 701(b)(2) (the Register’s duties include providing “information and assistance” to
Federal agencies and courts on copyright and related matters).
2 Norris Indus. v. Int’l Tel. & Tel. Corp., 696 F.2d 918, 922 (11th Cir. 1983). For this reason, courts credit
the Office’s expertise in interpreting the Copyright Act, particularly in the context of registration. See, e.g.,
Esquire, Inc. v. Ringer, 591 F.2d 796, 801–02 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (giving “considerable weight” to the
Register’s refusal determination); Varsity Brands, Inc. v. Star Athletica, LLC, 799 F.3d 468, 480 (6th Cir.
This document is scheduled to be published in the
Federal Register on 03/16/2023 and available online at
federalregister.gov/d/2023-05321, and on govinfo.gov
the application used by applicants seeking registration of their copyrighted works.3 While
the Act identifies certain minimum requirements, the Register may determine that
additional information is necessary for the Office to evaluate the “existence, ownership,
or duration of the copyright.”4 Because the Office receives roughly half a million
applications for registration each year, it sees new trends in registration activity that may
require modifying or expanding the information required to be disclosed on an
application.
One such recent development is the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence
(“AI”) technologies capable of producing expressive material.5 These technologies
“train” on vast quantities of preexisting human-authored works and use inferences from
that training to generate new content. Some systems operate in response to a user’s
textual instruction, called a “prompt.”6 The resulting output may be textual, visual, or
audio, and is determined by the AI based on its design and the material it has been trained
on. These technologies, often described as “generative AI,” raise questions about whether
the material they produce is protected by copyright, whether works consisting of both
human-authored and AI-generated material may be registered, and what information
should be provided to the Office by applicants seeking to register them.
These are no longer hypothetical questions, as the Office is already receiving and
examining applications for registration that claim copyright in AI-generated material. For
example, in 2018 the Office received an application for a visual work that the applicant
2015) (“the Copyright Office’s expertise in identifying and thinking about the difference between art and
function surpasses ours”), aff’d on other grounds, 580 U.S. 405 (2017).
3 17 U.S.C. 409.
4 Id. at 409(10).
5 The term “expressive material” is used here to refer to AI output that, if it had been created by a human,
would fall within the subject matter of copyright as defined in section 102 of the Act. See id. at 102(a).
6 See Prompts, Midjourney, https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/prompts (noting for users of the artificial
intelligence service Midjourney a prompt is “a short text phrase that the Midjourney [service] uses to
produce an image”). To be clear, this policy statement is not limited to AI technologies that accept text
“prompts” or to technologies permitting prompts of a particular length or complexity.