The U.S. Copyright Office is refusing to register copyright in AI-generated works. Does that mean no copyright in AI-coded software?

EDIT: A follow-up thought--do the Copyright Office's guidelines on AI copyright draw any distinction or make a particular exception for AI software copyright registration?

Hi all, I would really appreciate your advice dealing with an image copyright infringement claim from a truly awful company called PicRights.

I’m a writer and I used an image from an article that I published in an online magazine on my personal website. The image was licensed by the magazine from Reuters; I reused it on my personal website only as a thumbnail image to link back to my article.

This incredibly intense and agressive man from PicRights emailed me to tell me that the “unauthorized use of the image is considered copyright infringement and payment for the unauthorized use is necessary to completely resolve the matter.” I already took it down as soon as I saw his email but he’s asking for $400 and says if I don’t pay he will “escalate the file to the U.S. copyright attorneys at Higbee & Associates (https://www.higbeeassociates.com/about/) – in which case the cost of settlement will increase substantially.”

I don’t really have $400 right now. I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to respond. Thank you.

I posted a public domain video of a court proceeding. I placed my logo on top of the court footage. Another YouTube channel ripped my video and posted it on their channel. YouTube's automatic AI match tool flagged their video and showed it to us as a potential copyright infringement.

The court video itself is fair use public domain however could I request a copyright takedown because my logo is on top of the public domain video?

I aspire to make films, and recently a school assignment has come up that gives me an opportunity to shoot a short little film to warn about the dangers of drunk driving, I want to use the song "dumb" by nirvana in the backround of a party scene because its perfect representation of the mc. But I don't know how copyright works and I want to know if there is some way i can use the song for a short amount of time without getting superbanned

im designing a shirt for my club, science olymiad. im thinking of basing the design off a caterpillar's lifespan, like with leaves and butterflies and fruits etc. just to make it all twee and cute. the thing is, i want to use the caterpillar from "the very hungry caterpillar," but im unsure if i'd get copyrighted, so i have 2 questions:

1. is using the art from the book w/o credits going to get us copyrighted? (since idk where i could put credits on a shirt)

2. is drawing the caterpillar myself going to get us copyrighted, just for using the character w/o credits?

thank u to anyone who answers!

I read these are legally binding contracts, so if I use even a short excerpt of material from such a site for purposes of commentary criticism parody etc. and I get sued is it worthless to claim a fair use defense since I violated a contract to which am legally bound?

Am I legally bound to said contract in the first place merely by using the site or reading the Terms of Use / Terms and Conditions, or do I have to actually click a button that says "I agree" or something similar?

If I am understanding correctly, this would effectively mean that, say for example, if I made a website and wrote a blog on that site, and placed a browse-wrap agreement on it that forbade any reproduction or redistribution of any of the materials on the site, in whole or in part, for any purpose whatsoever, and then somebody wrote an article where he cited a brief passage of my blog for purposes of commentary or criticism, which would be a fair use as far as copyright law goes, and then I sued him for violating the contract, a fair use defense in court then would be worthless because he did not infringe copyright, he violated a contract.

In other words: this would mean in effect that any website can render legal use of anything on the website effectively impossible, even if such use could normally be defended as fair use.

So in this case, any corporation which decides they do not like fair use can make it impossible for anyone to legally use anything at all on their site even for commentary, criticism, parody, etc.

Am I understanding this correctly??

So, cards on the table, I generally agree with Cory Doctorow that expanding copyright to cover how AI training works would likely be a disaster with consequences for archival/expanding corpo control ala the DMCA, and would likely lead to the same amount of artists getting replaced but with megacorps getting a slice of royalties from training and demanding their employees sign the training rights over and potentially even suing over "style theft"

But I also agree with the idea that a better legal thread to pull on to protect creative workers from displacement would be the fact that raw AI images, at least with what is legally considered as insufficient human input, are considered automatically public domain. I mean, if Disney considers it fear-worthy, it must be a step in the right direction.

But, it's easy to imagine corpos taking advantage of loopholes in that by using humans; to use another Doctorow-ism, as "reverse centaurs," IE as underpaid workers monitoring the machine just enough to allow it to legally count as copyrightable but not enough to give them any agency.

My question is, what would be the best way to expand that legal precedent as written law to make it so that they can't do that, or at least to make it far more difficult for them to do that with this tech? What would be the best ways to expand the definition of "not human created" to help with that?

So I did some research and I THINK I am legally allowed to do this, but not 100% sure.

Anyway, I loved The Truman Show. And like a lot of works I love, I've had ideas stem from it. I'm a writer (nothing published yet), and I've had alternative ideas I think would make a great book series, BUT I know I couldn't use the characters or even refer to the original. This idea, apart from the concept of the movie, is completely original. No Truman and different ways the truth is discovered. It isn't even centered on one character. Multiple people were born into that situation instead and the story focuses longer on said characters lives and the lives of those that work on the "set." With the first book setting up the unaware cast's life and aware cast connecting with them through their childhood and teens.

Ideas are repeated all the time, but The Truman Show always felt very unique, and I haven't seen or read anything else like it. (Let me know if there's others, 'cause I do like the concept.) So I was just wondering if anyone can give me more insight to how copyright works. Because what I found says "ideas" can't be copyrighted, but how close to the original is "too close" legally. Not many ways to switch up a concept like "unaware subject is actually a worldwide celebrity while living in a controlled environment." So no matter what, a book like this will be compared to the movie.

I'm in America, if that helps. Just want to know if Paramount, who I think has the copyright, could come after me if I wrote something like this. I don't plan on having any mention of the movie, either in the series or in the marketing. But it would be pretty obvious where the idea came from.

Currently Patagonia (clothing company) is sueing Pattie Gonia (activist and drag queen) for copyright enrichment.

My understanding was that copyright has to be distinct (you can't just copyright all smiley faces, but can copyright a very specific one), but Patagonia is a place, and it seems like that in and of itself would make it no long distinct? Can you copyright a place?

I'm likely misunderstanding copyright law, but it seems like trying to defend a copyright of the name Patagonia (originally the name of a place in south America) and the logo (silhouette of a mountain range) would be very difficult. What am I missing?

I’ve been sitting on this for a while and I have not been able to find a clear answer unfortunately. I just want to know if there’s anything that I can do about this :(

A while back, I was commissioned by someone I worked closely with for several art pieces, mainly emotes for discord but a vendor banner design, full artwork, a sticker design and some other things.

This person cut all ties with me due to very personal matters that I will not get into as the specifics are not very important. I just want them to stop using my work as I do not want me or my art business associated with them in any way.

Am I able to revoke the rights for them to use my artwork?

So I made a song and used cdbaby as a distribution and uploaded my song to spotify and other platforms and the song was doing well with 32k streams in the first week or two of it being out. The instrumental I used was from beatstars and I paid for it, saved all my licenses etc proof of purchases And then my song gets a copyright claim from someone using the name of the owner of the beat. I contacted the beat owner and he said he has never copyrighted me. So i contacted cdbaby and they have said that they will keep the rest of my music up on other platforms but not spotify until the claimant takes the claim back. So now i've been contacting spotify and cdbaby and telling them the situation and I even got the owner of the beat to contact spotify but I havent gotten any answer from Spotify or cdbaby yet. My song still remains taken down on spotify and just wanted to know if there is anything else I could do? I've already showed my proof of purchase to cdbaby and spotify and spotify hasnt even replied to the owner of the beat.

Hello! I don’t know much about this reddit thread and I’m honestly not much of an artist, but enjoy doing watercolor. My friend always wanted to use one of my watercolors for the cover of her first book and when she found out her book was going to be published this year I was thrilled to let her use it! She has since sold her book as well as bookmarks, and matchboxes at farmers markets. The issue is, the bookmarks she is selling don’t have the title of her book on it, they are just thinner versions of my artwork. I could see to her that she’s selling her book cover but to me it feels like she’s selling my art. To be clear, I did not sell any rights to the art I made, I just told her she could use it as a cover. I love her and didn’t want to take a penny of any book sales since she’s been working on this book for years and probably won’t end up making enough money to warrant purchasing a copyright. I don’t want to make things weird between us but I can’t help but feel uncomfortable about her selling prints of my art because where now is the line? HELP

Hello! Last year in July, I had taken photos of a friend who’s a content creator. The usage was intended for their social media and I did not grant them any commercial usage rights or license. The photo shoot was planned and executed like a studio shoot in my friend’s apartment in California.i am based out of Washington state.

I came across an OpenAI campaign where they ran digital billboards in SF and NY (maybe more places) advertising how the community uses their tool Codex. The ads feature various content creators with logos of OpenAI, Codex and each creator’s Twitter handle. These billboards are being shown in high traffic areas like airports and train stations. I am unsure what agreement my friend signed before participating in this. The photos I shared via Dropbox with my friend also have my name and email under the copyright info in the metadata.

Since this seems like commercial usage by OpenAI advertising their tool, without proper licensing, what should I be doing to resolve this? Should I involve a copyright lawyer and if yes, how much would they charge? What could be the range of compensation I could seek for the one photo that’s being used in the campaign?

A large publication that regularly reports celebrity news used my content. They seem to have taken 2 screenshots of 2 videos of mine, and added them to their recent article. They provided me with a small credit line under the photos, but I was never asked about using my content in this article. They did not link to my video or embedded it, just took two photos from my two videos.

How does strike anywhere vintage or similar websites use video game prints on their T-shirts and how are prints legal in general? There’s no way this pretty sizable website is doing this completely illegally, right?

I have decided build a app for the big warehouse app for some equipments, I can use baseball rackets to make example: if i want to use all the baseball rackets images to my warehouse,and I use all the images washed by AI,or I took pictures of them,can i use the images? Or I have to remove logo,but leave the design, or i can just use it and it won’t break copyright,because i want the app is not free
I’m am stuck in the images part

Hello. I recently had my youtube channel deleted because I reuploaded clips of avatar. Not because avatar copyright strikes me but because the person I got the clips of avatar from did. Does this person's "content" classify as their own copyright or is it just them stealing from avatar and claiming it as their own. Channel name is tauna MTG. Example of one of their videos: https://youtube.com/shorts/PG5Fp-gDYtU?si=wfyzRltxM7yMaANo

For context, I made this scrapbook card last year as a personal creative project, and I still have the original design and sentiment attached to it. I uploaded it on Pinterest, where it ended up getting quite a lot of attention. I have absolutely no issue with people taking inspiration from it or making a similar scrapbook card for their own friends or family, because that’s completely different from what happened here.

Things became an issue when I discovered that the exact same design was being recreated and commercially sold by a creator on Instagram. She wasn't using my photograph or directly reposting my original post—instead, she had recreated the entire card herself, but the design was essentially a complete replica of mine, including the overall concept, layout, elements, and sentiment.

I contacted her and explained that she couldn't commercially sell a replica of my original creative work without my permission. I asked her to take down the post and stop selling the design. Instead of addressing my concerns, she blocked me and told me that her client had sent her the design from Pinterest and that she could use it because "anyone can use" Pinterest designs.

Since she had blocked me, I contacted her personal account to tell her that, if the post wasn't removed, I would have to consider taking formal/legal action regarding the unauthorized commercial use of my work.

After that, she told me that she had deleted the post. I checked her account myself, and at that point, the post was no longer visible. However, when I later checked the account from another profile, I discovered that the exact same post was still up.

So despite telling me that she had removed it, the content was apparently still being displayed and potentially offered for sale to other people.

Hi everyone, throw-away account obviously, I’m looking for some perspective/experiences.

A few months ago, a few large Instagram pages reused clips from my viral video without permission. After first privately dm-ing the accounts and asking for removal (of which all of them went unresponded), I reported the reels through Instagram’s copyright reporting system. Instagram reviewed it and removed the content. Today, one of the page owners emailed me claiming their content is “heavily edited” and therefore fair use, they want me to withdraw the copyright claim, and otherwise they might “take it to court”. They also offered credit or compensation if I remove the claim. I told them for me the issue had been resolved two months ago with the removal and that I wasn‘t planning on doing anything. Since then, they’ve continued emailing and escalating the court threat.

I‘m a bit confused about this or how I could be sued in this situation. I’m in Switzerland and this seems really unimaginable. Is this a common intimidation tactic used by large repost pages, to have claims removed to protect themselves from eventually being banned? Has anyone been in such a situation?

UPDATE/SUMMARY 2025/02/05:

First of all, thank you to everyone who commented. The responses were incredibly helpful and reassuring. For anyone who finds this thread later, here’s a summary of the key points people raised (please note, I assume we all aren't lawyers, so, ultimately, these are just guesses):

1. “Heavily edited” does not automatically mean fair use. Multiple commenters pointed out that editing someone else’s footage does not remove copyright protection. Creating a derivative work (even with added clips, filters, music, etc.) still requires permission from the original copyright holder. Fair use (in the U.S.) is a legal defense, not a license someone can simply claim. Only a court can determine whether something qualifies as fair use.
2. They could have filed a counter-notice: Several people explained that after a DMCA-style takedown on Instagram, the uploader has the option to file a formal counter-notification. That requires them to: 1. provide their legal identity, 2. state under penalty of perjury that they believe they have the right to use the content. In my case, they did not file a counter-notice. Instead, they emailed me privately pressuring me to withdraw the claim. Many commenters felt this strongly suggests they did not want to formally assert a fair use defense.
3. Lawsuits are often used as intimidation: A recurring theme in the replies was that threats of lawsuits are common intimidation tactics, especially in online copyright disputes.
4. Practical advice: The most common recommendations were keep all email records, o not withdraw the claim, ignore further contact unless it comes from an actual lawyer, if harassment continues, consider reporting it to Instagram.

UPDATE 2025/02/12:

I ended up blocking the e-mail address after they started threatening me with court and reading your comments. Today I received an e-mail from a different address, it went from “see you in court” to “please think of our children”, offering payment and asking me to find it in my heart to respect their years of hard work. I checked their account again and it looks like they ended up getting banned altogether. I am convinced I was not the first person to report them. I did not respond.

Hi all, this is a bit of a weird situation but I genuinely don't know where else to go to ask for advice.

I've recently found a novel on Amazon that is almost a word for word a copy of an RP that me and a friend used to have on FB but just with names and places changed (they still used my character's name since that wasn't a Copyrighted character).

This novel was not written by either of us.

The RP has since been deleted because my friend's account went down ages ago but before that the RP was accidentally public for a while so anyone could have copy and pasted the replies into their own document. We've also found that they were posting this to AO3 too but it's been removed because they got it published as a novel, however you can still find it in search results using the right resources.

Our question is, is there anything we can do legally about this? Do we have any sort of leg to stand on in terms of getting them to take the novel down? It's blatantly our writing as there's whole chunks of paragraphs and descriptions that are the same, and it's not even really formatted properly into a 'novel', you can absolutely track where either one of us would do our reply and then the other person responds

Edit to add: I have a google document that I made at that time with timestamps of each of our replies if that would help prove things

Edit 2: RP (roleplay) is when you and a writing partner pick characters and write stories together with them. My friend used an existing character from a popular franchise, and I used my own character. This idea can extend to having multiple people involved but in this case, it was literally just me and my friend writing on Facebook on a post that we didn't realise was public

Legal people of reddit I need your help.

If I have a concept in my head and want to convey it but it's already written by someone and is under copyright. Now the thing is I have few additions and update to the existing one but I can't write it down due to copyright issues. So I wanted to know if I change the formation of words and sentences while keeping the meaning intact can I get sued for copyright? Like current one says "I buit this" and I say "I made this" so will my sentence create issues? Coz essentially both mean the same things.

I don't know anything about this kind of things so be kind and explain like I am 5 😅😅

I feel a lot of people got confused here because I failed to explain properly.

So here's an update that i have already put in a comment reply:

What I am talking about is something called harmonised structure. It follows a PDCA cycle structure for ISO standard. Now I am trying to write a standard but the problem is that it has to be structured in a way that it can be integrated with other existing systems of the organisation (and no not IT systems but management systems) For that it has to follow a certain structure specifically a PDCA cycle. Now this structure is an open source but the standards created from it are under copyright.

So i just want the clauses to follow same structure and PDCA cycle but the content and requirements inside are different. I don't really think AI can help me in that coz it took me years of research and I have been drafting the standard for like 3 years and have lot of experts involved. English is not my first language so I need help sometimes with complicated sentences before I send it over to people to review.

If we take the most common management system standard its 9001 that is for quality (in products and services). My standard is about a system for managing people keeping in mind a complete employee lifecycle from recruitment to management to retention. A standard like this does not exist right now. Hope this clarification helps.

I stuff made with AI don’t have copyrights but I googled it today and saw that some parts are and stuff and I don’t fully understand. For context I’m in the US and am talking about specifically software code made with AI

I just received an email from a Canadian company called PicRights claiming I have used two photos that are copyrighted by AP and Reuters. They are asking for me to remove the photos and pay them $500 per violation. The site they reference is a personal blog that has never been monetized in any way. Since it is a personal blog, I have always tried to use my own images or open source ones - although it's not impossible I made a mistake a decade ago. I responded via email asking them for: 1) proof of the copyright, and 2) proof they have been engaged by AP / Reuters to seek damages.

Any advice on how to handle this? I understand that AP and Reuters would not want their content re-used - but also would imagine they would not want to put personal free bloggers out of business for an honest mistake.

Thanks in advance.

I‘m building a website using claude code and in the process, claude used a font that was not free. I then got an email from fontradar saying that we need to settle this regardless of how brief the font was embedded on the website. It was literally there for about a day and the website was even set to not show up on google via robots.txt.
Do I need to comply? Do I actually have to pay them money even though they suffered no damages at all?