Chinese Court Rulings on Copyright in AI Images

The Beijing Internet Court’s 2023 decision in case (2023) Jing 0491 Min Chu No. 11279 recognized copyright in a particular AI-generated image. The court focused on the user’s choices from conception through final selection: designing visual elements, selecting and ordering prompts, adjusting parameters, and refining the output. It treated the AI model as a tool rather than the author and found the human’s intellectual input produced personalized expression in that image. The decision also addressed infringement when another person used the image without permission and removed attribution. A 2026 Beijing Internet Court account describes a different result. An art student claimed rights in an AI-assisted design but lacked records of the original creation process after her account was banned. Recreating a similar image with many prompts during litigation did not prove what had happened in the original process. The court dismissed the claims for insufficient evidence of originality. The contrast shows why a favorable 2023 decision cannot be reduced to “prompts always create copyright.” Human authorship and originality depend on facts and proof. These cases address whether specific images qualified as works under China’s Copyright Law and who authored them. They do not settle every question about training-data use, model outputs, infringement by model providers, or ownership terms in a service contract. Chinese court decisions are also not a blanket national license. The parties, jurisdiction, evidence, and specific creative choices matter, and other courts may analyze different facts. Creators who want to establish their contribution should preserve prompt history, parameter changes, drafts, selected outputs, edits, and publication records. Record which portions were human-created and which came from a model. For disputes, preserve original exports and metadata rather than trying to reconstruct the process later. Businesses should review their service terms and permissions separately from copyrightability.