Can You Copyright a Book Written with AI? The Truth Every Author Needs to Know

Hey author, did you use AI to write your book? Do you think you own the copyright to that AI written book? Guess what? You might not. And if you publish it, anyone can copy it, paste it and sell it legally. But like everything in publishing, there's a lot more to this story. If you're using AI in your author journey and wondering if you can actually copyright your book, well, this video is for you. Hi, I'm Julie the book broadcast, not to be confused with Julie the Book Bot who hangs out inside our Author Launch Kit software to answer your book related questions 24 7. I am the founder of Book Launchers, a self publishing services company for nonfiction authors. We help you write, publish and promote your book so it makes an impact and an income. Now let's start with the big question. Why does copyright even matter? Well, some prominent authors sued Anthropic, which has claude for using their books to train its AI models. The court decided that books Anthropic purchased legally were considered fair use, meaning the authors weren't entitled to compensation. But Anthropic had also trained on books scraped from sites that didn't have the rights to distribute them. For those Anthropic does have to compensate the authors. Now here's the key point to this. An infringed author, one with a book on sites that were scraped. You know the ill gotten books that infringed author is only eligible for compensation if they filed for copyright. And in the U.S. yes, the moment you put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard, you technically own copyright. But to defend that copyright in court, you need to formally register it. And there's rules around that and what you can and can't register. In March 2023, the U.S. copyright Office made it crystal clear copyright protects only material that is the product of human creativity. Translation. If AI wrote your book and you hit publish without lifting a finger, you've got yourself a public domain manuscript. Yep, that's right. You're not the author, you're the button pusher. And buttons don't get copyright protection. But here's my guess. You're watching this video so you are not likely someone that is doing that. You know, chatgpt, write me a book on leadership and you know, add some humor and then printing it. I'm sure you're doing something in between. Even if you use Chatty or Claude or some other tool like Dibly Create or which by the way Dibbly Create has been my favorite outline tool for a long time. But it's getting better and better at writing. First Drafts of books too. You can check it out at my affiliate link book launchers.com Dibbly D I B B L Y Anyway, even if you used one or all of those tools, chances are you read it and laughed and it wasn't good enough. And it was flat and it was missing your personality. So you got in there and started editing and you added this and removed that and. And you took that robot junker and polished it. And if you did that, well, guess what? You can protect it. You are the creative force behind the final work. That's what the Copyright Office calls sufficient human authorship. So let's make this real with a case you may or may not have heard about. Zarya of the Dawn. It's a comic book created by Krish Kashtanova. Chris wrote the storyline, the text, and put the whole thing together. But Chris maybe not an artist. Instead of hiring an illustrator, midjourney was used to generate all the images. The U.S. copyright Office looked at it and said, cool comic, but no copyright on the images. They weren't made by you. So the text Chris wrote, copyrightable. The arrangement of the words and the images. The overall compilation, copyrightable. But the individual images made by AI, no protection. They're considered public domain, which means anybody can use them because they weren't created by a human. This is a great example of what's okay and what isn't. If you're using AI as a helper to brainstorm, draft, or generate artwork that you then edit and arrange, your human creativity is protected. But if you hand everything over to the robot and hit publish afterwards, that's when you lose copyright protection. Only the script written by a human was protected in that case. So if your book is 100% AI output with no human editing, no copyright. But. But if you shape it and sculpt it and put your voice on the page, well, yes, your work is yours to protect. Now here's how you actually fill out the copyright application when AI plays a role. Step one. Disclose that AI was used. The US Copyright Office now requires applicants to explicitly state if AI generated material is included in work. That means during registration you must indicate that AI helped create parts of your content. The next step is only claim copyright for your human authored contributions. You can't claim ownership of pure AI output, but your storytelling, editing, arrangement or significant creative input, those are protected. The key is properly distinguishing between human and AI parts. Step 3. Use the material excluded and material included sections in the ECO form in the ECO registration system. List AI generated parts under material excluded, like images or text you didn't create. List List your own creative contributions under material included. There's even a small other box to add notes explaining what's what. Step 4 Keep your drafts, notes and AI prompts as evidence if someone ever questions your claim later, you want to be able to show how much editing selectivity or creative intent you had. And that can make a big difference, especially proving it wasn't just robot output. I'm going to put a link from a lawyer explaining this because I am not a lawyer, so I'll put this one explanation that I thought was pretty good and understandable down below for you to check out if you want more details. But here's an example of what this looks like. So the material excluded field note would say something like Artwork generated by midjourney AI based solely on AI prompts. So that's excluded material included original text edits and the selection, arrangement and compilation of AI generated images human authored and creativity evident in the Note to Copyright Office box. You'd say something like this work combines my original narrative, structural design, editorial direction and visual elements generated by AI. I retain all human authored creative control and I'm not claiming copyright in the raw AI outputs. Get it? Okay and none of these shenanigans that people post after I do a video like this, how will they ever know if I even used AI? Just disclose it. Maybe they would never know. But you want protection if you ever need it. There's a whole lot of authors wishing they'd filed for copyright protection in the US right now because they would then be eligible for a check after this anthropic settlement. But to the point of this video, the bottom line is AI can help you write and you can own the copyright. You just have to have made a significant material contribution to the final product. And if you're writing a book for your brand, for your business or your bottom line, the only way to stand out is to make it your own. Because you don't want to have a book that any robot could have written. And if you want help writing a book that's actually yours and is great and readers want to read it when, well that's why we're here. And boy oh boy do we have some exciting things coming up. I am relaunching Self Publish and succeed this fall. And to launch it, we're having a three day summit party November 13th, 14th and 15th to make sure you get the details on where to register and how to participate. Please of course subscribe to the channel, but get yourself on our newsletter@book launchers.com newsletter. All right, after you like this video and chat about any questions you have down below. I'll see you on the next video.