Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law

By Congressional Research Service.

Summary: CRS legal analysis of copyright liability questions raised by generative AI training and outputs.

Relevance: Falls under Law, Policy & Borders: clarifies the legal terrain social workers and educators should know when using or recommending generative AI tools whose training data and outputs raise unresolved copyright liability questions.

Key findings: In Thaler v. Perlmutter (2025), the D.C. Circuit held that “the Copyright Act requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being,” so purely AI-generated output isn’t copyrightable, though the Copyright Office has registered works where humans control the expressive elements. Two June 2025 district court rulings (Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta) found training on copyrighted books “transformative” and fair use, while treating downloading from pirate sites as a separate, unresolved question.

Read the original: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922