The Beijing Internet Court has recognised the copyright for a piece of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) in the first ruling of its kind in mainland China, where a growing number of enterprises are caught up in a frenzy to advance use of the technology in transforming industries and improving people’s daily lives, reports the South China Morning Post. In a decision issued on Monday, the court said that a picture, generated via US start-up StabilityAI’s text-to-image software Stable Diffusion, should be considered an artwork under the protection of copyright laws based on the “originality” and intellectual input of its human creator, according to a redacted document of the ruling shared by IPcode, a legal industry account on social media platform WeChat.
The intellectual property (IP) infringement lawsuit was initiated in May by the plaintiff surnamed Li, who used Stable Diffusion to create an image of a young Asian lady and posted it on China’s Instagram-like platform Xiaohongshu. Li sued a blogger surnamed Liu for allegedly using the image without permission in a post on Baidu-owned Baijiahao, a Chinese content-sharing platform.
The Beijing Internet Court ruled that the AI-generated image was an artwork and ordered the defendant Liu to issue a public apology as well as pay the plaintiff RMB 500 ($70.43) in damages and RMB 50 for court fees. Its decision is open for appeal at the Beijing Intellectual Property Court.