Are AI-generated product images protected by copyright laws in the US and EU?

Quick Answer

In both the US and the EU, images generated entirely by AI prompts are not eligible for copyright protection because they lack human authorship. The US Copyright Office has been consistent on this, and on March 2, 2026 the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving the human-authorship rule settled at the federal level. The lack of registrable copyright does not place the image in the public domain, and where a person makes meaningful creative contributions (selection, arrangement, edits, retouching), those human-authored portions may still be copyrightable.

What the US position actually is

The US Copyright Office's January 2025 Part 2 report on copyrightability is direct: "the mere selection of prompts, even if those prompts are detailed and are the product of some human effort, does not itself yield a copyrightable work." Where a work mixes human and AI-generated content, only the human contributions are potentially copyrightable, and applicants must disclose the AI-generated material when registering.

This is a separate question from public domain. A work that fails the human-authorship test is not registrable, but it is not automatically released for any third party to use freely either. Trademark, trade-dress, design rights, and rights of publicity sit on top of the image regardless of its copyright status.

What the EU position actually is

EU copyright law protects works that are the "author's own intellectual creation." The CJEU set this standard in Infopaq, Painer, and Cofemel: a work qualifies when it reflects the author's personality through free and creative choices. Pure prompt-to-image output, with the model making the visual decisions, struggles to meet that test for the same reason it fails in the US.

The EU AI Act is a separate regime. It does not create or remove copyright. It adds transparency obligations: providers of generative AI must mark synthetic outputs in machine-readable form, and deployers must disclose certain AI content to users. Those obligations apply from August 2, 2026 and are about disclosure, not ownership.

Copyright breakdown by region

Region	Stance on AI Copyright	Human Authorship Requirement
United States	No protection for purely AI-generated output. Settled by Thaler v. Perlmutter (cert denied March 2, 2026).	Strict. Prompts alone do not count; human creative contributions are separately registrable.
European Union	No protection for purely AI-generated output under CJEU "intellectual creation" doctrine. EU AI Act adds transparency, not ownership.	High. Work must reflect the author's free and creative choices.
United Kingdom	Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 nominally protects computer-generated works, but the UK Government's 2026 Report on Copyright and AI proposes removing it. Position is unsettled.	The "person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation" is the nominal author under s.9(3).

Does this matter for ecommerce?

Practically, rarely. Copyright on a single product detail page image was never the asset that mattered. The product, the brand name, and the trade dress are protected by separate IP regimes that do not depend on the image's copyright status.

If a competitor downloads a brand's AI image and reposts it, a copyright claim on the image itself is weak. Trademark and trade-dress claims on the product, brand identity, and any visible brand logo remain available. In most catalog work, that is the protection that matters.

Where Nightjar fits

Nightjar grants commercial usage rights for the Assets generated in a Team's Library. Because the workflow is built around real product photographs (the brand uploads its product as the input Asset), the human-authored anchor (the product photograph itself) stays in the chain of custody. Where a brand wants stronger human-authorship contributions on top, the Edit tab supports plain-English edits, color and ratio changes, and multi-image composition that add documented human creative selection on top of the AI output.

None of this makes a brand a copyright owner of a purely AI-generated image. It does mean the workflow is designed to preserve the parts that copyright still protects: the underlying product, the brand's trade dress, and the human creative contributions a brand layers on after generation.