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  4. Vol 5, Issue 2, 2026

Research on Copyright Ownership of AI-Assisted Generative Outputs

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DOI: 10.23977/law.2026.050207 | Downloads: 1 | Views: 99

Author(s)

Yichi Liu 1

Affiliation(s)

1 School of Law (Intellectual Property School), South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, Guangdong, China

Corresponding Author

Yichi Liu

ABSTRACT

Traditional literary and artistic creation has long been understood as an activity grounded in human intellectual and creative labor. Under the traditional copyright framework, both the recognition of a work and the determination of derivative rights have generally been premised on human authorship. However, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has enabled AI systems to participate extensively in the creative process, thereby challenging existing rules governing copyright ownership. The traditional conceptual structure based on the binary relationship between "author and work" or "subject and object" is increasingly difficult to apply to situations involving multiple participants, such as users, developers, and platform operators. How to respond to technological developments while maintaining the coherence and stability of the copyright system has become an important issue in current legal research. Using China's first "AI text-to-image" case as a point of departure, this paper reviews existing academic views on copyright ownership and proposes an analytical framework that takes the "degree of creative contribution" as the primary criterion, supplemented by the principle of party autonomy. The paper seeks to provide a reference for the further development of copyright ownership rules in the context of artificial intelligence.

KEYWORDS

AI-assisted generative outputs; copyright ownership

CITE THIS PAPER

Yichi Liu. Research on Copyright Ownership of AI-Assisted Generative Outputs. Science of Law Journal (2026). Vol. 5, No. 2, 45-52. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/DOI: 10.23977/law.2026.050207.

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