Beijing Internet Court holds a prompted Stable Diffusion image is a copyrighted work and the prompter is its author

2023-11-27China

Li v. Liu, Beijing Internet Court, (2023) Jing 0491 Min Chu No. 11279, civil judgment of first instance (27 November 2023) (Presiding Judge Zhu Ge, with Judges Yan Jun and Li Wanxing)

The plaintiff generated an image of a young woman with the open-source Stable Diffusion model, an added base model and a LoRA model, a positive prompt describing the subject, setting, lighting and style, negative prompts copied from a forum and edited, and parameters including 33 steps, a guidance scale of 9 and a random seed, adjusting the LoRA weight, the seed and the prompts across four documented generations before selecting the final picture, which he posted on Xiaohongshu with an "AI illustration" label. The defendant used it to illustrate a poem on Baijiahao with the platform watermark removed. The Beijing Internet Court held the image is a work of fine art under Article 3 of the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China. It reflects intellectual achievement because the plaintiff designed the figure, selected and ordered the prompts, set the parameters and chose the output, and it is original because those choices reflect personalized expression rather than a "mechanical intellectual achievement." Whether a generated image reflects personal expression "requires case-by-case assessment and should not be generalized." Under Article 11 authors are natural persons, legal persons or unincorporated organizations, so the model cannot be an author, and the model's designer is "just the producer of the creation tool." The defendant infringed the right of authorship and the right of communication through information networks and must apologize and pay 500 yuan.

What it changesThe United States position is that a work needs a human author, as Thaler v. Perlmutter held in August, and the Copyright Office's registration decisions treat a prompted output as lacking one; the Beijing Internet Court reached the opposite result on a record showing iterative prompting and parameter choice. For a company whose product generates images, designs, code or text, the outputs may be protectable in China and not at home, which changes where enforcement against copying of outputs is possible and makes the generating system the asset that patents must protect everywhere else. Two practical points follow. Keep the prompt, parameter and selection record for any output the company may need to assert in China, because the court decided on exactly that record. In patent applications claim the generation pipeline, including the way prompts, model weights and parameters are combined, since that is protectable in every jurisdiction regardless of how the output is treated. The judgment is first instance and can be appealed within fifteen days.