My WaPo op-ed: The Copyright Office’s denial of copyright to AI-prompted images hurts progress and U.S. creators

  • The Washington Post published my op-ed that criticizes the U.S. Copyright Office’s denial of copyright to images generated used Midjourney or an AI text-to-image generator. [Click here.]
  • As I explain in the op-ed, “The Copyright Office’s position is wrong. It misunderstands authorship and ignores the copyright clause’s goal of promoting “progress” by offering authors incentives to create new works, including with new technologies. Its decision also misunderstands the creative process.”
  • Neither the Copyright Clause nor the Copyright Act imposes a requirement that authors must exercise exacting control over the creative process, much less that they must be able to predict ahead of time the final product in every aspect. Such a crabbed view of authorship goes against how artistic works are often created.