Julie Broad explains why books written entirely by AI can't be copyrighted. The US Copyright Office ruled in March 2023 that copyright protects only human creativity. If you use AI as a tool but make significant creative choices, you can copyright the work, but you need to register it in the US to enforce those rights.
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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. If you're using AI in your author journey and wondering if you can actually copyright your book, well, this video is for you. 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. An infringed author is only eligible for compensation if they filed for copyright in the US but to defend that copyright in court, you need to formally register it. In March 2023, the US Copyright Office made it crystal clear. Copyright protects only material that is the product of human creativity. Even if you use Chatty or Claude or some other tool like Dibbly Create, chances are you read it and laughed and it wasn't good enough, and it was flat and it was missing your personality. You took that robot junker and polished it. And if you did that, well, guess what? You can protect it. That's what the Copyright Office calls sufficient human authorship. 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. 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.
