A German court rules that AI-generated designs do not benefit from copyright protection

This does not necessarily rule out the copyright protection of works produced using an AI model. The question is whether the human “author” has retained sufficient control over the creation of the work that it does indeed express that individual’s personality.  

This was the question facing the Munich District court in a recent case¹ in which the plaintiff asserted copyright in three logos. Having considered the relative contributions of the human “author” and the plaintiff’s AI model, the court concluded that the none of the logos was a copyright work.

Facts of the case

The claimant sought an injunction to prevent the defendant from using on the defendant’s website three logos created by the claimant using AI.  Here are the logos:

The claimant produced the logos by providing the AI with “prompts”, that is to say by instructing the AI to produce images corresponding to the claimant’s description of the desired output. The level of detail in the prompt varied from a two-line description for logo on the right – ‘create a “simple but unusual logo” for a website where legal texts can be read’ – to a 1700 character prompt for the middle logo. The initial prompt for the left-hand, "shaking hands” logo fell between these two extremes but was followed up by further prompts seeking to refine the image resulting from the first and subsequent prompts. ‍

The claimant’s argument – AI is just a tool

There is no doubt that, had the claimant created his logos without the use of AI, they would have been capable of enjoying copyright protection. The claimant argued that the use of AI did not alter this fact. AI was simply a tool, albeit a powerful one, that allowed the claimant to express his human creativity by translating what was in his head into real world images. The use of iterative prompts to arrive at a final image was equivalent to the activity of a sculptor, who chisels a statue out of stone step by step, checks at each stage how the work is progressing and, if necessary, makes corrections to ensure that the end result corresponds to his creative concept.

The Court’s decision

The Munich court firstly confirmed that, in accordance with the decisions of the European Court of Justice, a work could only be original and therefore enjoy copyright protection if it reflected the personality of its author by expressing their free and creative choices. The use of AI in the production of a work did not mean that the work would necessarily be denied copyright protection. However, the work would only enjoy such protection if the human input (the prompts) shaped the resulting output in a sufficiently objective and unambiguously identifiable way. This would not be the case if the design decision was left to the AI by means of general, open-ended instructions, even if those instructions were numerous and iterative.

Applying this reasoning to the logos in issue, the Court found that the technical activity of the AI model largely outweighed the creative influence of the claimant in producing the logo designs. Even in the case of the logo where the claimant had provided an extensive initial prompt, the actual design was left to the AI rather than dictated by those prompts. Subsequent prompts instructing the AI to make changes to the initial output still left the design implementation of those changes to the AI.

In summary, none of the logos was sufficiently original (in a copyright sense) to be protected.  

Takeaways

While the decision of the Munich court appears to be a logical application of the existing EU case law on copyright ability, it remains to be seen whether its approach to AI-generated works will be followed by other EU courts including, most importantly, the European Court of Justice. In particular, might a different court have found copyright-sufficient human creativity in the extensive refinement (though iterative prompts) made by the plaintiff to the initial version of the “shaking hands” logo generated by the AI model?²

It would be particularly interesting to see how a UK court might deal with a similar claim to copyright protection. UK courts currently apply the same fundamental copyright originality test as the EU but, in the past, originality depended upon an assessment of the author’s skill, labour and judgement involved in the creation of the work. In light of the work that the claimant apparently spent in refining the earlier incarnations of the “shaking hands” logo so as to arrive at the final design, an approach to originality that incorporated something akin to the skill, labour and judgement test, may conceivably have resulted in a more favourable outcome for him.

[1] Case 142 c 9786/25

[2] Interestingly, it is clear that the US Copyright Office would have reached the same decision as the Munich court – see part 2 of its report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence dated January 2025.