Registering an AI-assisted work in the US

Registration is the step most studios skip and then wish they had taken, usually at the moment they need it and cannot get it retroactively. It is also the step people assume is blocked entirely once AI is involved. It is not. A work containing generated material can be registered — what changes is that you have to say which parts are generated and be specific about the human contribution you are claiming.

That specificity is the whole exercise. Everything below is downstream of one sentence you have to be able to write before opening the form.

What registration buys, and what it does not

Worth being clear before spending the fee.

For US works, registration is a precondition to filing an infringement suit under 17 U.S.C. § 411(a). The Supreme Court held in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com (2019) that this means the Office must have acted on your application, not merely received it — so "we'll register if we ever need to" builds a delay into the moment you can least afford one.

Timely registration is also what unlocks statutory damages and attorney's fees under § 412: registration before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication. Miss that window and you are limited to actual damages and the infringer's profits, which for a social-first ad can be a number not worth litigating over.

What registration does not do is create authorship. Filing on a work whose entire content is generated does not convert it into a protected work — the Office's practice requires human authorship, and that requirement is what the Thaler litigation tested and failed to unseat. Registration records a claim; it does not manufacture one.

Before you open the form: write the claim sentence

One sentence, plain language, describing what a human contributed. If you cannot write it, the problem is upstream in production and no filing strategy fixes it.

Sentences that work: "Original script; selection, coordination and arrangement of generated footage; editing and sound design." "Photograph of the product composited over generated background; retouching and colour work." "Original text; selection and arrangement of illustrations."

Sentences that do not: "Extensive prompt engineering." "Creative direction of the model." "Curation of several hundred outputs."

The second group describes effort spent instructing a system, and instructing a system is not what the claim is built on. If that is genuinely all you have, the useful outcome of this exercise is discovering it now rather than after a dispute.

The filing steps

1. Pick the right application type. The Office directs applicants whose work contains more than de minimis AI-generated material to the Standard Application rather than the abbreviated Single Application, because the abbreviated route has no way to express a limitation of claim. Form names and eligibility rules change, so confirm on the current version before you start typing.

2. Enter the title, completion year and publication details. Publication date matters more than it looks — it is what sets the three-month window in § 412. For campaign work, "published" is usually the first public distribution, not the client sign-off.

3. Name the human author, and only the human author. In the "Author Created" field, describe the human contribution: text, photograph, editing, compilation, whatever applies. Do not name the model as an author or co-author. That is the exact claim the Thaler application made, and it is the reason it was refused.

4. Limitation of Claim → Material Excluded. This is where the disclaimer goes. Select "Other" and describe the generated material plainly: "AI-generated imagery", "AI-generated video footage", "AI-generated instrumental audio". Do not name the specific model here; the field is about what is excluded, not how it was made.

5. Limitation of Claim → New Material Included. Your claim sentence, essentially verbatim. This is the field an examiner reads to understand what you are actually asserting, and it is the one that most rewards being concrete.

6. Upload the deposit copy. The work as published, in the format the Office specifies for that class. Deposit what you distributed, not the layered working file.

7. Add a Note to Copyright Office only if a fact genuinely needs explaining. Keep it short. It is not a place to argue the merits of your contribution.

8. Pay the current fee and keep the case number. The effective date of registration is the date the Office received a complete submission in acceptable form — all required elements, not the date it issues. That date is what your § 412 window is measured against, so record it.

Worked examples

The two limitation fields are where people freeze, so here is what they look like filled in for common shapes of work.

Work	Material excluded	New material included
30-second ad cut from generated clips	AI-generated video and imagery	Script; selection, coordination and arrangement of footage; editing; sound design
Illustrated book	AI-generated illustrations	Text; selection and arrangement of illustrations
Product composite	AI-generated background imagery	Photograph; retouching; compositing
Explainer with generated b-roll and a recorded voiceover	AI-generated video footage	Script; narration performance; editing and arrangement
Merch design on a generated base	AI-generated artwork	Original typography; layout and arrangement; image editing

Two patterns in that table are worth internalising. The excluded column is always short and generic; the included column is always specific. That asymmetry is correct — you are not describing how the machine worked, you are describing what you did. And "selection and arrangement" carries a lot of weight, but only earns its place if you actually selected and arranged rather than accepting one finished output. What makes an AI print design legally protectable is the production-side version of that constraint.

Fixing filings you already made

If you have registrations or pending applications that included generated material without disclosing it, the guidance addresses correction rather than leaving you stranded.

For a registration that has already issued, the route is a supplementary registration that corrects or amplifies the original record. For an application still pending, contact the Office and correct it before it is examined. Neither is pleasant and both are considerably better than the alternative, because § 411(b) allows a registration to be challenged where inaccurate information was included with knowledge of the inaccuracy and the inaccuracy would have caused the Office to refuse. The Supreme Court's decision in Unicolors v. H&M (2022) read that knowledge requirement to cover mistakes of law as well as fact — meaning a genuine misunderstanding is not automatically fatal, but a knowing omission is a real exposure.

The practical read: a correction filed voluntarily is a much better fact pattern than a disclosure gap discovered by opposing counsel.

Making it repeatable per project

The reason studios do not register is that the application feels like a research project each time. It only feels that way because the information is scattered. Fold three fields into the job record you already keep and the filing becomes a copy-paste.

Field to capture at production time	Fills in
What was generated, with model and date	Material Excluded
What a human made or changed, one line each	New Material Included
First public distribution date	Publication details and the § 412 window
Where the intermediates and working files live	Evidence if the claim is ever tested

That record does double duty, because a delivery-side disclosure obligation asks for most of the same fields — what to tell clients about using AI covers the client-facing half, and content credentials through a real pipeline covers what survives an export. Provenance metadata is evidence of history; it does not establish authorship on its own.

The generation side is largely automatic — generations are kept with their prompts attached, and finding something you made before retrieves one by description rather than filename. The human side is what you have to write down as you go, because nobody reconstructs a decision log from a folder of exports eighteen months later.

None of this is legal advice. Office practice and form design both change, the case law is still developing, and anything you intend to enforce is worth putting in front of counsel in your jurisdiction first. The wider copyright and safety guide covers the adjacent questions this post deliberately leaves alone.

FAQ

Do I have to disclose AI use if it was minor?

The guidance turns on whether the generated material is more than de minimis. A trivially small generated element in an otherwise human-authored work is treated differently from a generated background filling half the frame. The threshold is a judgement call, and the safe habit is to describe rather than argue: if an examiner would want to know, say so.

Can I register a batch of social videos in one application?

Sometimes. The Office offers group registration options for certain categories with their own eligibility rules around publication timing and authorship, and they are worth checking against your actual output pattern before filing individually. Where a group option fits, it changes the economics of registering short-form work substantially.

What if the client owns the deliverable — who files?

Whoever holds the rights being claimed, which is a contract question rather than a registration one. This is exactly why the ownership clause needs to be honest about what can and cannot be assigned: you cannot transfer copyright in material that carries none. Usage rights in creator contracts covers how those grants are normally structured, and what a usage right is is the short version.

Is it worth registering work with a short commercial life?

Often not, and that is a legitimate decision rather than a failure. The calculation is the cost and effort of filing against the realistic chance of an infringement worth pursuing. Where it clearly is worth it: evergreen brand assets, anything licensed onward, anything you have already seen copied, and anything a competitor would benefit from lifting wholesale.