A court in Munich has ruled that three logos generated by artificial intelligence lack the human creative input required to obtain copyright protection. Despite the use of prompts, the judges held that the degree of technical contribution from the AI overwhelmed the plaintiff's creative choices, meaning these designs lacked sufficient originality.

In the European Union and the United Kingdom, for a design or other work to obtain copyright protection, it must possess originality—that is, it must involve creative choices made by a human author so that their personality is reflected in the work.

Of course, this does not necessarily exclude the possibility of "works created using AI models obtaining copyright protection." However, the question is whether the human "author" retained sufficient control over the creative process such that the work indeed reflects that individual's personality.

This is precisely the issue faced by the Munich Regional Court in a recent case. In this case, the plaintiff claimed copyright over three logos. After considering the relative degrees of contribution between the human "author" and the plaintiff's AI model, the court concluded that none of the three logos constituted a copyrighted work.

Facts of the Case

The plaintiff sought an injunction from the court to prevent the defendant from using three logos on their website that the plaintiff had created using AI. The plaintiff created these logos by providing "prompts" to the AI—instructing the AI to generate corresponding images based on the plaintiff’s description of the desired output.

Plaintiff's Argument: AI Is Merely a Tool

There is no doubt that if the plaintiff had created his logos without using AI, these logos would have been eligible for copyright protection. The plaintiff argued that using AI does not change this fact. AI is merely a tool, albeit a powerful one, that allows the plaintiff to express his human creativity by translating concepts in his mind into real-world images. Using iterative prompts to obtain the final image is equivalent to the activity of a sculptor: a sculptor gradually carves a statue from stone, inspecting the progress of the work at each stage and making corrections where necessary to ensure the final result conforms to his creative concept.

The Court's Ruling

The Munich court first confirmed that a work can only possess originality—and thus enjoy copyright protection—if it reflects the author's personality by expressing free and creative choices. Using AI in the process of creating a work does not mean that the work will necessarily be denied copyright protection. However, a work can only enjoy such protection if this human input (prompts) shapes the final output in a sufficiently objective and clearly identifiable manner. If the design decisions are left to the AI through general, open-ended instructions (even if these instructions are numerous and iterative), this may not be the case.

Applying this reasoning to the logos in question, the court determined that in the process of producing the logo designs, the technical activity of the AI model largely exceeded the plaintiff's creative influence. Even though the plaintiff provided detailed initial prompts, the actual design was still completed by the AI rather than being determined by these prompts. Subsequent prompts instructing the AI to modify the initial output still left the implementation of these modified designs to the AI.

In conclusion, none of these logos possessed sufficient originality (in the sense of copyright) to obtain protection.

Key Summary

While the Munich court's ruling appears to be a reasonable application of current EU copyrightability case law, it remains to be seen whether other courts in the EU will follow its approach to AI-generated works. Of particular interest is whether different courts would consider that the plaintiff's act of extensively refining initial versions of the "handshake" logo generated by the AI model (through iterative prompts) reflects human creativity sufficient to constitute copyright.

Meanwhile, it will be particularly interesting to further explore how courts in the UK will handle similar claims for copyright protection. UK courts currently apply the same basic copyright originality test as the EU, but in the past, originality depended on an assessment of the skill, labor, and judgment invested by the author in the process of creating the work. Given the refinement work the plaintiff performed to finalize the early versions of the "handshake" logo, it is conceivable that if a method similar to the skill, labor, and judgment test were used to assess originality, the outcome might be more favorable to the plaintiff.