Why AI Copyright Is Failing: 3 Reasons You’re Doing It Wrong
Stop trying to copyright your Midjourney "masterpieces." You are wasting your time and your legal fees. I’ve watched creators spend months building entire brands on AI-generated assets, only to realize they have zero legal moat.
The US Copyright Office isn’t confused. They are very clear. If a human didn't draw it, a human doesn't own it.
The "Button Press" Fallacy
You think because you typed 50 words into a box, you are an author. You aren't. You’re a customer.
The law requires "human authorship." This is the wall everyone is hitting. I’ve seen "prompt engineers" get angry when their 1,000-word prompt is laughed out of court. The court doesn’t care how long your prompt was. They care who executed the pixels.
If the machine makes the final "creative" choices—the lighting, the brushstrokes, the composition—the machine is the creator. And machines can't hold copyright.
Stop focusing on the prompt. The prompt is a suggestion. It is not the work. If you want to own it, you have to change it. You have to paint over it. You have to edit it until it is unrecognizable from the original output. Ownership comes from the struggle, not the instruction.
The Frankenstein Problem
Every time you generate an image "in the style of" a living artist, you are digging your own grave. You are creating a derivative work of a collective. You cannot claim a cake is yours if every single ingredient was stolen from different bakeries.
We are entering the era of "Data Debt." If you can't prove where your training data came from, your output is a legal liability. Large Language Models are black boxes. They are "laundering" human creativity and handing it to you.
The courts are starting to see through the laundry. They are looking at the "input" side of the equation. If the input is a mess of unlicensed data, the output is legally radioactive. You aren't building an asset. You are building a lawsuit.
Protecting the Wrong Moat
You are obsessed with the output. You should be obsessed with the process.
Most creators are trying to copyright the JPEG. That’s the old way of thinking. In a world of infinite generation, the JPEG is a commodity. It is worth exactly zero dollars.
If you are using public tools to create public-style art, you have no moat. Anyone can "reverse prompt" your work in three seconds. They can recreate your "unique" style with a single click.
You are trying to build a fence around a cloud. It doesn't work. If you didn't build the dataset, you don't own the aesthetic. If you don't own the aesthetic, you don't have a business. You have a hobby that someone else can copy-paste.
The Insight: The Rise of "Proof of Effort"
Here is my prediction: The future of copyright won't be about the "Final Work." It will be about the "Work Log."
In two years, the USCO will require a "Layer History" for every digital submission. If you can't show the 50 hours of manual refinement, you get no protection. We are moving toward a "Proof of Effort" economy.
The legal system will stop looking at what was made and start looking at how it was made. If your process was: Prompt -> Generate -> Upscale, your copyright will be denied. Every time.
If you want to own your work, you have to prove you worked for it. The era of the "Lazy Billionaire" creator is over before it even started.
The Reality Check
I’m not saying stop using AI. I’m saying stop lying to yourself about what it is.
It is a tool. It is a power-saw. A power-saw can help you build a house, but the saw doesn't own the architecture.
If you are building your future on the idea that you can "prompt" your way to a multi-million dollar IP, you are delusional. You are building on sand. The tide of regulation is coming in, and it’s going to wash away every "creator" who didn't pick up a digital brush.
The "Creative Class" isn't being replaced by AI. It's being replaced by the "Hybrid Class." The people who know how to use the machine, but also know when to turn it off.
Are you building an asset, or are you just renting a hallucination?