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

Quick Answer

In the United States, the Copyright Office says purely AI-generated material is not protected by copyright; protection can cover only human-authored expression, assessed case by case. An official European Parliament briefing says EU law has no AI-output-specific copyright rule, but its originality test requires an author's own intellectual creation expressed through free and creative choices, making protection unlikely for output with no meaningful human creative contribution. A tool's commercial-use terms may let you use an image, but they do not create copyright or clear third-party rights.

When can an AI-generated product image receive US copyright protection?

The US Copyright Office's January 2025 report says copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material or material over whose expressive elements a person had insufficient control. With current generally available systems, prompts alone do not provide that control. Copyright may cover human-authored expression that remains perceptible in the output, creative modifications, or a sufficiently creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of AI material. The assessment is case specific.

The D.C. Circuit held in Thaler v. Perlmutter that the Copyright Act requires a work to be authored initially by a human. The Supreme Court denied review on March 2, 2026, leaving that judgment in place without issuing its own merits decision. Thaler concerned an image presented as autonomously generated with the machine named as sole author; it did not decide how much human control makes an AI-assisted image copyrightable.

When can an AI-generated product image receive EU copyright protection?

The EU has no specific Union-wide rule deciding the copyright status of AI output, according to a December 2025 European Parliament briefing. The EU AI Act does not settle authorship or copyrightability.

Existing CJEU case law supplies the test. In Cofemel, the Court said protected subject matter must reflect the author's personality through free and creative choices. That human-centred standard makes copyright unlikely for an autonomous output with no meaningful human creative contribution. An AI-assisted image may qualify when the final image expresses a person's own creative choices, but the threshold remains legally unsettled and may be applied through national courts.

How do copyright, commercial-use rights, and infringement differ?

Question	What it determines
Copyrightability	Whether the final image contains protected human-authored expression.
Authorship and ownership	Who created that protected expression and who owns it under employment, assignment, or other applicable rules.
Contractual usage rights	What the AI provider permits the user to do with the output. A contract cannot create statutory copyright where the law provides none.
Infringement risk	Whether the output unlawfully reproduces protected expression or violates separate rights such as trademarks, designs, or publicity rights. The US Copyright Office notes that generated output can replicate or closely resemble protected works; an output can lack its own copyright and still infringe someone else's rights.

For example, Nightjar's Terms of Service grant users rights, as between the user and Nightjar and to the extent permitted by law, to use their generated output for lawful commercial purposes. That contractual permission is separate from copyrightability and is not clearance of third-party rights.

For commercially important product imagery, retain the source photographs and editable files, record the human choices and revisions, confirm the rights to every input and likeness, and review the output for protected third-party material. A source photograph keeps its own copyright, but using it as an AI input does not automatically make every part of the output copyrightable.

This article provides general information, not legal advice. For a high-value campaign or dispute, ask a lawyer in the relevant US state or EU Member State to assess the specific image and workflow.