A Byline on AI Copy Can Bring Liability Without Copyright, Scholar Says

An invisible watermark reportedly planned for Claude-generated text has brought a harder question into focus: who, if anyone, owns AI-written work? Copyright scholar Daniel Gervais argues that a byline can make someone accountable for generated text without giving them copyright or a right to transfer it. Platform contracts can still allocate separate rights and risks around the service.

EUobserver reported that Anthropic announced an invisible watermark for Claude-generated text in connection with EU AI Act compliance. The reported measure concerns the origin of generated text. Gervais’s proposed framework addresses a different issue in mixed human-AI work: whether the person made enough creative choices for copyright to attach.

Under Gervais’s interpretation, a LinkedIn post generated verbatim by Claude would have no copyright owner. He also says an article generated from interview recordings, research and source papers would not automatically belong to the person who prompted the model. Publishing either under a person’s name can create responsibility and potential liability, he argues, but not copyright or a transferable right.

John Newman and Andres Sawicki reviewed 100 generative-AI terms-and-conditions contracts in a working paper. Among contracts that explicitly addressed output ownership, about two-thirds named the user as owner while retaining provider rights to use outputs. The study found that 84.9% gave providers a nonexclusive license to customer materials, 63% allowed sublicensing, 30.1% allowed use for any business purpose, and 13.7% stated no limit on provider use. It also found that 69.8% required users to pay when their use led to copyright claims against a provider; 96% allowed providers to modify terms without consent, 88% gave that power to providers but not users, and 42% did not require meaningful notice of changes if notice was required at all.

Newman and Sawicki recommend voiding one-sided provisions and making firms, rather than individual users, legally responsible when copyrighted material is used without permission. Those are policy proposals, not current rules. Gervais’s framework likewise remains a proposed way to assess the difficult cases where people and AI both contribute to a work.