Copyright

Copyright is a federal grant of exclusive rights in an original work of authorship that has been fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Protection arises automatically the moment the work is fixed; no registration, notice, or publication is required for the right to exist. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is, however, a prerequisite to filing an infringement suit and unlocks statutory damages and attorney's fees.

Subject matter and the fixation requirement

Section 102(a) protects original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium. Categories include literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pictorial/graphic/sculptural works, motion pictures, sound recordings, architectural works, and computer programs (treated as literary works). The originality bar is low, modest creative spark is sufficient, but ideas, facts, procedures, processes, systems, and methods of operation are excluded under § 102(b).

Exclusive rights and infringement

Section 106 grants the copyright owner the exclusive rights to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform, and display the work publicly. Infringement is established by proving ownership and copying of constituent elements that are original. Statutory damages range from $750 to $30,000 per work for ordinary infringement and up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement, plus attorney's fees in successful registered-work cases.

Fair use after Warhol

The four-factor fair use analysis under § 107 was reframed by Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023). The Supreme Court held that the first factor, purpose and character of the use, turns on whether the new use shares the same commercial purpose as the original, not merely on whether it adds new expression. Commercial uses with substantially similar purposes to the original receive narrower fair use protection than the pre-Warhol "transformative use" doctrine had suggested.

AI-generated works

The U.S. Copyright Office and the D.C. Circuit have held that human authorship is required for copyright protection. Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. 2025) affirmed the denial of registration for a work created entirely by an AI system. The Copyright Office's January 2025 guidance further clarifies that prompts alone are insufficient to make the prompter the author, but works combining AI assistance with sufficient human creative contribution remain protectable for the human-authored portions. See also Generative AI Output.