1PhD candidate, Department of Security Convergence, Graduate School, Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea
2Professor, Department of Industrial Security, Chung-Ang University, Republic of Korea
Correspondence to Hangbae Chang, E-mail: hbchang@cau.ac.kr
Volume 20, Number 1, Pages 39-61, March 2025.
Journal of Intellectual Property 2025;20(1):39-61. https://doi.org/10.34122/jip.2025.20.1.2
Received on December 14, 2024, Revised on January 20, 2025, Accepted on February 27, 2025, Published on March 30, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a significant influence on the creative methods of culture and art. In particular, generative AI, which creates an image of a desired shape by entering a command, that is, a prompt, is widely used in the production of artworks. Discussions on the copyright of artworks created using generative AI are currently active. Moreover, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced the “Generative AI Copyright Guide” to present the criteria for the copyright registration of generative AI products. In this study, based on the copyright registration criteria presented in this guide, the guidelines and major cases of the US Copyright Office were analyzed. To suggest the direction of improvement, first, through the analysis of precedents related to cameras, we determined whether AI could be viewed as a creative tool. Next, to determine whether the prompting could be viewed as a creative act, the cases of “Youngnam Cho” and “Andy Warhol” were examined, and then the precedents of the Chinese court were analyzed. The study results showed that AI is a creative tool, and when it is used as a tool, it is in accordance with Korean copyright laws and precedents, and copyright recognition under these laws depends solely on ”creative intervention” or “creative contribution through the practical work instructions” of human authors.
AI copyright, generative AI, prompting, AI art, intellectual property
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The author received manuscript fees for this article from Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.