Facts
The plaintiff claimed to have generated an image with an AI tool, using a prompt asking for a depiction of two parties signing a business contract in a formal setting, such as a conference room or a law office in Prague, showing only their hands. The plaintiff had sent the image to the Prague law firm TAUBEL LEGAL, which posted it on its website. On 12 May 2023 he emailed the firm asking for its removal. He sued under section 40(1) of the Czech Copyright Act for a declaration of authorship, removal of the image and an injunction. The firm argued that the image was not a copyright work. It was undisputed that the image had been created by AI.
Question
The preliminary question was whether the plaintiff was the author of the image, since under section 40(1) only an author whose rights have been infringed can seek a declaration, removal and an injunction. That raised whether the AI itself could be an author under section 5(1), which defines the author as the natural person who created the work, and whether the person who wrote the prompt could be. The court also considered whether the image met the definition of a work in section 2(1) as the unique result of an author’s creative activity, and whether the prompt was an unprotected idea or subject matter under section 2(6).
Decision
In its judgment of 11 October 2023 the court dismissed the action in full. The AI cannot be an author, because under the Act only a natural person can be one. The plaintiff offered only his own statement to show that the image came from his prompt and, despite the court’s instruction, produced no further evidence, so he lacked standing. Going further, the court added that an image created with AI is not a work, as it is not the unique result of a natural person’s creative activity, and that a prompt can at most be described as the subject matter of a work or an idea, which the Act does not protect. No costs were awarded.
Why it matters
The judgment is reported as one of the first Czech decisions on copyright in AI output. The outcome turned on the burden of proof, and the statements that AI output is not a work went beyond what was needed to decide the case. Even so, in those additional remarks the court stated that writing a prompt alone does not make someone an author. It is a first-instance judgment that became final without an appeal. Whether a more detailed prompt or later human editing would change the result was left open.
The same question elsewhere
Is an AI-generated image protected by copyright?
The user's choice of prompts and parameters counted as original input.
Li v. Liu (李某诉刘某)United States · 2025NoA work must be authored in the first instance by a human; the application named the AI as sole author.
Thaler v. PerlmutterThe court said only a natural person can be an author and a prompt is merely an idea; the claim itself failed on another ground.
— this decision