Hoping to copyright your AI song? The US Copyright Office's AI guidance is vague in many aspects, and this article aims to decipher it. Here are crucial things you must know to ensure your copyright application doesn't fail!
by AiSongFix Staff | August, 21, 2025.
One of the most frustrating aspects of trying to copyright AI-generated material is that the US Copyright Office's guidelines are vague at best, lacking definitive requirements in many instances.
⚠️ Disclaimer: I'm not a music attorney nor do I play one on TV. I'm a songwriter and producer. Any information contained herein should be used as a reference only and is not intended to serve as, replace, or substitute for legal advice. This information is designed to help you develop informed questions you can present to an entertainment attorney who specializes in music law. That said, where applicable and available, I will include quotes from music entertainment attorneys to help further clarify information.
The following was taken from the US Copyright Office's Report on Copyright Registration Guidance for Works Containing AI-Generated Materials 🌐↗, issued March 16, 2023.
"In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of 'mechanical reproduction' or instead of an author's 'own original mental conception, to which [the author] a visible form.'
"The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work. This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry."
The above suggests that there are no definitive requirements one has to meet, as "case-by-case" seems to indicate that it's a judgment call by the Office.
Our takeaway is that to obtain a copyright from the US Copyright Office for a work containing AI-generated material, a significant human contribution is required. Unfortunately, the Office doesn't indicate what constitutes "significant contribution."
📌 Pro Tip: To be on the safe side, for now, we have chosen to define significant human contribution as two things:
(1) The majority of both melodic and lyrical creation comes from a human.
(2) At least some of the human contribution constitutes original, creative input that came from a human mind, and not simply rewriting and/or editing AI's original ideas.
Yes, a prompt is a human inputting information into an AI interface, but in terms of copyright, it is not creative human input, and that's the essential factor.
Although you prompt AI to do something, the AI ultimately decides what to output. The Copyright Office puts it this way:
"If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the office will not register it.
"For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology — not the human user.
"Based on the office's understanding of the genitive AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material.
"Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist — they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output."
Giving a musical example, the Office states:
The Office further clarifies that prompting is not considered authorship and must be disclaimed in the registration application.
According to official Copyright Office documentation:
This seems to indicate that when you are composing songs (both lyrics and melodies) with AI, you need to document the process so that you keep a record of what AI contributed and what you contributed.
We've created a downloadable checklist to help you track your AI-co-writing process.
↓📁 AI Song Human Contribution Checklist | (PDF 155.33 KB)
To learn more about this subject and many of the topics covered in this article, I recommend this YouTube video:
How To Copyright AI Step By Step Guide Lawyer Explains 🌐↗
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