Aaron Wininger of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A., The National Law Review; Beijing Internet Court Recognizes Copyright in AI-Generated Images
"On November 27, 2023 the Beijing Internet Court issued a decision recognizing copyright in AI-generated images. The plaintiff, Mr. Li, used Stable Diffusion (an artificial intelligence) to generate the image involved in the case and published it on the Xiaohongshu platform; the defendant, a blogger on Baijiahao, used the image generated by the plaintiff’s AI to accompany the article, and the plaintiff sued. The Court held that the artificial intelligence-generated image involved in the case met the requirements of “originality” and reflected a human’s original intellectual investment and should be recognized as works and protected by copyright law. This is the opposite of the decision reached by the U.S. Copyright Office in Zarya of the Dawn (Registration # VAu001480196) that did not recognize copyright in AI-generated images. Note this Beijing case is also different from the recent Thaler v. Perlmutter decision (Civil Action No. 22-1564 (BAH)) because Thaler was trying to recognize the AI as the author and not the person using the AI as a tool as author."
