Facts
The plaintiff, Li, used the open-source model Stable Diffusion to generate an image of a person by entering prompts and adjusting parameters, and posted it on the Xiaohongshu platform. The defendant, Liu, used the image without permission to illustrate an article the defendant published and removed the plaintiff’s signature watermark. Li sued in the Beijing Internet Court for infringement of the right of attribution and the right of communication over information networks. The dispute was the first in China to put the copyright status of an AI-generated image before a court, and the court examined the plaintiff’s generation process, including changes to prompts and parameters, in detail.
Question
The court had to decide whether an image produced with a text-to-image model can be a “work” under the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China, which requires an intellectual achievement with originality in the fields of literature, art or science. If it was a work, the court then had to decide who its author was: the user who wrote the prompts, the AI model itself, or no one. The answer determined whether the defendant’s use infringed any right.
Decision
The court held that the image was an artistic work and that the plaintiff was its author. The plaintiff had made an intellectual investment by designing how the figure would appear, choosing prompts and their order, setting parameters and selecting the image that met expectations. The repeated adjustment of prompts and parameters reflected the plaintiff’s aesthetic choices and personal judgment, which gave the image originality. An AI model cannot be an author under Chinese copyright law. The court ordered the defendant to apologize and pay RMB 500 in damages. Neither party appealed, and the judgment took effect.
Why it matters
The Beijing High People’s Court’s work report describes it as the first such case in China (全国首例). In this case the court treated prompting, parameter-setting and selection as sufficient human creative input, and it stressed that the outcome depends on the degree of the user’s intellectual contribution in each case. In the United States, by contrast, courts have held that a work without human authorship cannot be registered.