The Beijing Internet Court has recognized the copyright for a piece of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) in the first ruling of its kind in mainland China, where a growing number of enterprises are using the technology. The Court ruled that a picture, generated using U.S. start-up StabilityAI’s text-to-image software Stable Diffusion, should be considered an artwork under the protection of copyright laws based on the “originality” and intellectual input of its human creator, according to a redacted document of the ruling shared by IPcode, a legal industry account on social media platform WeChat. The intellectual property (IP) infringement lawsuit was initiated in May by the plaintiff surnamed Li, who used Stable Diffusion to create an image of a young Asian lady and posted it on China’s Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu. Li sued a blogger surnamed Liu for allegedly using the image without permission in a post on Baidu-owned Baijiahao, a Chinese content-sharing platform.
The Beijing Internet Court ruled that the AI-generated image was an artwork and ordered the defendant Liu to issue a public apology as well as pay the plaintiff CNY500 in damages and CNY50 for court fees. Its decision is open for appeal at the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. The court said Li “made a certain degree of intellectual investment” in selecting prompt texts, setting up parameters and designing the presentation, among various inputs. The “originality” of the image in dispute means that Li had continuously added prompts and repeatedly adjusted the parameters to come up with a picture that reflected his “aesthetic choice and personalized judgment”, the court said in the ruling. “To encourage creation is the essential purpose of the copyright system,” the court said in the document. “As long as an AI-generated image reflects the original intellectual investment of a human being, it should be considered a work that is protected by copyright laws.”
Angela Zhang, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Chinese Law at the University of Hong Kong, said the decision could create a strong precedent for related cases. “The ruling, being the first decision on AIGC copyright infringement by a Chinese court, is very significant,” Zhang said. “Its issuance by the Beijing Internet Court, despite being a relatively low-tier court, signals a substantial policy endorsement for the AI industry.” The ruling has added fuel to heated arguments on whether AIGC is protected by copyright laws, even though the Beijing Internet Court asserted that future disputes about an author’s personal expression in AI-generated images should be judged on a case-by-case basis. “Copyright should protect the intellectual creation of human beings,” IP lawyer Qiao Wanli, Senior Partner at Zhejiang Zeda Law Firm, said. “But in the case of AI-generated content, a human being is the one giving instructions and guidelines, while AI did the actual creation.” The Beijing Internet Court’s ruling, according to Qiao, is likely to have far-reaching implications for future AI copyright disputes, which could eventually benefit Chinese Big Tech companies that are now providing similar AIGC tools to the public.
The court’s ruling stands in stark contrast to the approach of some its global peers, including the United States Copyright Office. In February, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated images do not have copyright protection because these “are not the product of human authorship”, the China Daily reports.
