What's this about?
A determination that AI-generated content is not protected by copyright in the EU. HN noted the US position is broadly similar and reached immediately for the governing precedent.
What exactly is the principle, and what's the monkey selfie?
Copyright protects works of human authorship. That's not a technicality — it's the foundation, because copyright exists to incentivize human creativity. The monkey selfie case settled the shape of it: a macaque pressed the shutter on a photographer's camera, and courts held no one held copyright, since the monkey can't and the photographer didn't create the image. AI output sits in the same position. The interesting question isn't the principle but the line: how much human contribution converts machine output into a protected work, and what evidence establishes it.
What's the community saying?
- The asymmetry is the sharpest point: if copyright doesn't protect AI-generated content, then AI arguably shouldn't be restrained from generating content that *is* protected — yet the reality runs the other way.
- "The same is true in the US. This is a nothing burger." A significant contingent considered it settled law being restated.
- The monkey selfie precedent was the reference everyone reached for, and it does the explanatory work well.
- The unanswered question that matters most: does this apply to software? As more code is AI-written, the protected status of a codebase becomes a live commercial question.
- A neat connection to this week's watermarking thread: if watermarks let you definitively identify machine-generated text, they also let you identify what isn't copyrightable.