AI-Assisted Work Copyright Registration Checklist: A Practical Checklist

Summary. This checklist turns the Copyright Office's rules for works containing AI-generated material into a sequence of concrete tasks for creators, in-house teams, and outside counsel. It covers confirming that a human authored something registrable, building a contribution record, sorting claimable material from material that must be excluded, settling authorship and ownership, choosing the right application and filing date, completing each field of the Standard Application, preparing the deposit, and answering examiner questions. Later parts address refusals and reconsideration, correcting earlier registrations that did not disclose AI material, protecting and enforcing the work once the certificate issues, and auditing an opponent's AI-assisted registration in litigation. Each item carries a short note on why it matters and the governing statute, regulation, case, or Copyright Office guidance. The checklist reflects the law and Office practice as of October 2024, including the March 2023 registration guidance and the 2023 district court decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter.

The Copyright Office issued a certificate for Zarya of the Dawn in September 2022, then cancelled it five months later when it learned from the author's own social media posts how the images had been made. The replacement certificate covered the text and the arrangement, not the pictures. Every defendant sued on an AI-assisted work now asks the question the Office asked, so the application has to answer it truthfully before anyone else does. Run this checklist before you file.

How to use this checklist

Work through Parts 1 to 8 in order for a new application. Use Part 9 if the Office refuses, Part 10 to clean up registrations filed before you adopted these practices, Part 11 once the certificate issues, and Part 12 if you are on the other side of a lawsuit and need to test an opponent's registration. Each item is phrased as an action, followed by a short note and the authority behind it.

The short version. Copyright protects only human authorship. The Office will register the human-authored parts of a work that contains AI-generated material, but the applicant must disclose AI material that is more than de minimis, describe the human contribution, and exclude the rest. Applicants who hide AI material risk losing the registration's value in litigation. The governing statement is the Office's Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence, 88 Fed. Reg. 16,190 (Mar. 16, 2023), and the leading case is Thaler v. Perlmutter, 687 F. Supp. 3d 140 (D.D.C. 2023), which held that a work generated autonomously by a machine cannot be registered. As of October 2024 Thaler's appeal is pending in the D.C. Circuit, the Office has said it will publish a further report addressing copyrightability, and Jason Allen's challenge to the refusal of Théâtre D'opéra Spatial has just been filed in federal court in Colorado. Check all three before relying on this checklist.

For the doctrine in depth, read Copyright in AI-Assisted Works: Human Authorship, Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the Copyright Office Guidance. For the same process told as a step-by-step narrative with worked examples, see Registering and Protecting Works Made With Generative AI: A Practical Guide.

Part 1: Confirm that a human authored something registrable

• Identify at least one element that a person created. Text, drawing, painting, photograph, music, performance, code, or the selection and arrangement of material all qualify if they are original. Copyright covers "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), and originality means independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991).
• Rule out any claim that rests on the machine as author. The Office registers only works created by human beings (Compendium (Third) §§ 306, 313.2), and owning or operating the system does not make its output yours. Thaler, 687 F. Supp. 3d 140. Courts have refused to treat animals, divine revelation, and natural forces as authors. Naruto v. Slater, 888 F.3d 418 (9th Cir. 2018); Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955 (9th Cir. 1997); Kelley v. Chicago Park District, 635 F.3d 290 (7th Cir. 2011).
• Do not count prompts as authorship of the output. Under the March 2023 guidance and the Zarya decision (Feb. 21, 2023), a prompt functions like instructions to a commissioned artist; the system, not the prompter, determines the expressive elements. The Review Board applied the same rule to an image produced from more than six hundred prompts in Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (Sept. 5, 2023).
• Look for human contributions the Office does credit. Creative selection and arrangement of AI material, substantial human modification of it, and human-authored material that remains perceptible in the result can all be claimed. The originality bar for each is low; a "distinguishable variation" can suffice. Alfred Bell & Co. v. Catalda Fine Arts, Inc., 191 F.2d 99 (2d Cir. 1951).
• Discount purely technical steps. Upscaling, denoising, cropping, and color correction rarely add authorship; the Review Board said so about upscaling in Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, and faithful digital renderings lacked originality in Meshwerks, Inc. v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., 528 F.3d 1258 (10th Cir. 2008).
• If nothing human remains, stop. Do not file. Go to Part 11 for contract, trade secret, and trademark protection.

Notes. The question is not whether AI was used but who determined the expression in each element. Writers who used a chatbot to brainstorm and then wrote every sentence themselves have a fully human work; artists who kept a generated image and changed nothing have nothing to register in that image.

Part 2: Build the contribution record before you file

• Open a contribution log for the work. For each element (chapter, page, image, track, level, module), record who made it, which tool and model were used, what inputs went in (prompts, sketches, reference images), what output was kept, and what the human did afterward. The Generative AI Authorship Toolkit has a ready-made log.
• Export prompt and generation histories now. Platforms change retention settings and close accounts; an export made today is evidence, and a deleted history is a gap.
• Preserve layered and versioned files. Keep layered image files, audio workstation projects, document version histories, and code repository logs. They show modification in a way a description cannot.
• Record selection effort. Note roughly how many outputs were generated and discarded for each element kept. Selection alone does not make you the author of a single image, but it supports a claim in the selection and arrangement of many.
• Get a short role statement from each contributor. One paragraph per person, signed and dated, describing what they made.
• Save the platform terms in force when the work was made. Note the date and version, any license the provider reserves, and any limits on commercial use for free tiers.
• Keep the log as a regular practice. Records kept in the ordinary course are easier to admit as business records under Fed. R. Evid. 803(6) and to authenticate under Fed. R. Evid. 901.
• Impose a hold if a dispute is foreseeable. Once litigation is reasonably anticipated, losing these records can lead to sanctions under Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(e).

Notes. Zarya turned in part on edits the Office could not evaluate, and Jason Allen's Photoshop work went uncredited because he did not describe it specifically. The record is what lets an examiner, and later a judge, see the human contribution.

Part 3: Sort claimable material from material to exclude

• Assign every element to one bin: fully human; human selection, coordination, and arrangement; human modification or perceptible human input; or AI-generated.
• Apply the de minimis test to each AI-generated element. Disclose AI material that would be independently copyrightable if a person had made it: an image, a paragraph, a melody, a function. A suggested synonym, a grammar fix, or a line of boilerplate code does not need disclosure.
• Claim compilation authorship where it exists. A creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material, including AI material, is protectable as a compilation, though the protection does not extend to the underlying material. 17 U.S.C. § 101; 17 U.S.C. § 103.
• Keep your edits on the claimed side. Exclude the raw AI material, not the human changes made to it.
• Exclude third-party and previously published or registered material too. The application must identify preexisting material in a compilation or derivative work and state the new material claimed. 17 U.S.C. § 409. For the mechanics, see Copyright Registration for Derivative Works.
• Write a one-line description of the human contribution in plain words ("text; 2-D artwork; selection, coordination, and arrangement of text and images").
• Write a one-line description of the excluded material ("AI-generated images"; "AI-generated text"; "AI-generated sound recordings"; "AI-generated source code").
• Flag close calls for a Note to Copyright Office rather than resolving them silently in your favor.

Notes. When in doubt, claim conservatively and explain. The 2023 guidance allows applicants who are unsure to state generally that the work contains AI-generated material and let the Office follow up. An honest narrow claim can be expanded; an overbroad one invites a challenge under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b).

Part 4: Settle authorship, ownership, and the claimant

• List only human authors. Never list the AI system or its developer as author or co-author.
• Treat employee work as work made for hire. If the creator is an employee acting within the scope of employment under the agency factors of Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989), the employer is the author and owner. 17 U.S.C. § 201(b).
• Check contractor work against the nine categories. A contractor's work is made for hire only if it fits a category listed in the § 101 definition and a signed writing says so. Get the writing before work begins: the Seventh Circuit requires it, Schiller & Schmidt, Inc. v. Nordisco Corp., 969 F.2d 410 (7th Cir. 1992), though the Second Circuit accepts a later writing confirming an earlier agreement, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Dumas, 53 F.3d 549 (2d Cir. 1995).
• Get a signed assignment where work-for-hire status fails. Transfers of copyright require a signed writing. 17 U.S.C. § 204(a). Without one, the hiring party usually holds only an implied nonexclusive license. Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555 (9th Cir. 1990).
• Confirm each claimed co-author contributed copyrightable expression. A collaborator whose only role was prompting may not be a joint author. Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500 (2d Cir. 1991); Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9th Cir. 2000). Settle ownership among collaborators in writing before filing.
• Name the correct claimant and include a transfer statement ("By written agreement") when the claimant is not the author.
• Confirm licenses for third-party inputs such as reference images, stock assets, fonts, and samples.

Notes. For a full employee and contractor analysis, use the Work Made for Hire Determination Checklist. A platform's promise that "you own the output" allocates whatever rights exist between you and the provider; it does not make the provider an author or a claimant, and it does not create copyright in AI material.

Part 5: Choose the application and the filing date

• Use the Standard Application. The Single Application is limited to one work created entirely by one individual who owns it and offers no way to exclude material, so it does not fit a work with excluded AI content.
• Check any group option before relying on it. Group registrations carry eligibility conditions, such as a common author, and some leave little room for exclusions. If the option cannot accommodate the exclusion you need, file individually.
• Consider registering purely human elements separately. A character sheet, a script, or a composition registered on its own carries a clean certificate with no limitation, while the registration for the finished work covers the arrangement and the rest.
• Determine publication status carefully. "Publication" has a statutory definition in § 101 that does not always match intuition for works distributed online. Misstated publication status and an improper "unit of publication" were the inaccuracies at issue in Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., 595 U.S. 178 (2022), and licensing-as-publication was the question in Archie MD, Inc. v. Elsevier, Inc., 261 F. Supp. 3d 512 (S.D.N.Y. 2017).
• Calendar the three-month window after first publication. Statutory damages and attorney's fees are unavailable for infringement that began before registration unless a published work is registered within three months of first publication. 17 U.S.C. § 412.
• Register within five years of publication to obtain the presumption of validity. 17 U.S.C. § 410(c).
• Decide whether you need special handling. For an extra $800, the Office expedites examination when litigation is pending or expected, for customs matters, or for contract or publishing deadlines (Compendium (Third) § 623). You cannot sue on a pending application. Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, 586 U.S. 296 (2019).
• Budget the fees. The Standard Application costs $65 online; first and second requests for reconsideration cost $350 and $700. Fees are set in 37 C.F.R. § 201.3; confirm the current amounts before filing.

Notes. The effective date of registration is the day the Office receives an acceptable application, deposit, and fee, not the day the certificate issues. 17 U.S.C. § 410(d). That is why a clean, timely first filing matters more than a fast certificate.

Part 6: Complete the Standard Application

• Type of work. Choose the category that matches the predominant authorship being claimed (literary, visual arts, performing arts, sound recording, motion picture or audiovisual).
• Titles. Enter the title as it appears on the work, plus any previous or alternative titles.
• Completion and publication. Enter the year the work was completed and, if published, the date and nation of first publication.
• Authors. Enter each human author (or the employer for a work made for hire), answer the work-made-for-hire question accurately, and give citizenship or domicile. Do not enter the AI tool, the platform, or the developer.
• Author Created. Check the boxes for the human contribution and use the "Other" field to say exactly what the person did: "text," "2-D artwork," "photographs," "selection, coordination, and arrangement of text and images," "editing and compositing of AI-generated imagery," "musical composition," "computer program." Avoid "AI-assisted artwork," "prompt engineering," and "created with [tool]."
• Claimant. Enter the owner and, if the owner is not the author, a transfer statement.
• Limitation of Claim: Material Excluded. Describe the AI-generated material briefly and accurately ("AI-generated images"; "AI-generated text"; "AI-generated background artwork"). Add third-party and previously published material. Naming the tool is optional.
• Limitation of Claim: Previous Registration. Enter the number and year of any earlier registration covering part of the work.
• Limitation of Claim: New Material Included. Restate the human contribution in the same terms as Author Created.
• Note to Copyright Office. In three to six sentences, explain how the work was made, which elements are AI-generated, what the human contributed, and that records are available on request.
• Rights and permissions and correspondent. Enter a contact who will see examiner email promptly; a missed email is a missed deadline.
• Certification. Have the certification made by someone who has read the contribution log. A knowingly false material statement in an application is an offense, 17 U.S.C. § 506(e), as are knowingly false statements to federal agencies generally, 18 U.S.C. § 1001.
• Save the record. Keep a PDF of the submitted application, the fee receipt, and the case number.

Notes. Sample entries for common works:

For software, websites, songs, and photographs, the general registration checklists apply alongside this one: Registering a Copyright in Software, Registering a Copyright in a Website, Registering a Copyright in a Song, and Registering a Copyright in Photographs.

Part 7: Prepare and upload the deposit

• Deposit the whole work, AI material included. The exclusion is made in the application, not by removing material from the copy. Deposit requirements are in 37 C.F.R. § 202.20.
• Use the best edition for published works and a complete copy for unpublished works.
• For computer programs, deposit identifying portions of source code and use the trade-secret redaction options where needed. Exclude AI-generated code in the application.
• Check file formats and upload limits for electronic deposits; use a shipping slip if physical copies are required.
• Keep confidential process documents out of the deposit. Deposits of registered works can be inspected at the Office. Do not deposit prompt libraries or workflow documents you want to keep as trade secrets; register the expression, protect the process.
• Confirm the deposit matches the claim. Pages, tracks, or files referenced in the Note to Copyright Office should be easy to find in the deposit.

Part 8: Answer examiner correspondence

• Calendar the response deadline the day the message arrives. The deadline is stated in the message, commonly forty-five days. If the file is closed, a new application gets a new effective date, which can cost statutory damages under § 412.
• Answer element by element. Identify pages, images, tracks, files, or modules, and say what the human did to each.
• Show modifications. Attach before-and-after images or excerpts for representative elements.
• Propose corrected claim language if the examiner's proposal excludes human material.
• Do not overstate. Correspondence becomes part of the Office's record, and later review is confined to it; in Thaler, the applicant's earlier statements that the machine acted autonomously foreclosed his later argument that he was the author.
• Decide whether to accept a narrower claim. Accept when the disputed material has little independent value or you need to sue soon; push back only with specific, documented human contributions.
• Keep copies of every exchange with the claim file.

Notes. Examiners often accept precise counterproposals. They rarely accept generalities about creative vision or the number of prompts used.

Part 9: If the Office refuses registration

• Calendar three months from the date of the refusal notice for a first request for reconsideration under 37 C.F.R. § 202.5, and budget the $350 fee.
• Build the request from the record. Explain why the refusal was wrong, with legal argument and specific facts about the human contribution, supported by the contribution log and before-and-after exhibits.
• If the first request fails, calendar three more months for a second request ($700), which goes to the Review Board. Its decision is the Office's final agency action (Compendium (Third) § 1706).
• Evaluate court review under the Administrative Procedure Act. The Office's actions are subject to the APA, 17 U.S.C. § 701(e); 5 U.S.C. § 702, and a refusal is set aside only if arbitrary, capricious, or contrary to law under 5 U.S.C. § 706. Courts have remanded poorly reasoned refusals, Atari Games Corp. v. Oman, 888 F.2d 878 (D.C. Cir. 1989), but usually uphold reasoned ones, Darden v. Peters, 488 F.3d 277 (4th Cir. 2007). After Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), the Office's legal interpretations get no Chevron deference, though its factual and discretionary judgments still get deferential review.
• Consider suing the infringer instead. After a refusal, 17 U.S.C. § 411(a) allows an infringement suit if the complaint is served on the Register, who may join within sixty days on registrability.
• Weigh value, timing, and facts before appealing. Documented, specific human control makes a better test case than a large number of prompts.

Part 10: Correct earlier registrations

• List every registration filed since the organization began using generative tools (for most, 2022 onward) and check each against its creation records.
• File a supplementary registration for each one with undisclosed AI material that is more than de minimis. The supplementary registration adds a Limitation of Claim without replacing the basic registration. 17 U.S.C. § 408(d); 37 C.F.R. § 202.6. The 2023 guidance tells applicants to do exactly this.
• Be prepared for cancellation where little human authorship remains. The Office's cancellation rules are in 37 C.F.R. § 201.7; it cancelled the first Zarya certificate and issued a narrower one.
• Document when and why you corrected. Under Unicolors, a good-faith mistake of fact or law does not invalidate a registration, but willful blindness can count as knowledge. Courts have declined to invalidate registrations for good-faith errors, Roberts v. Gordy, 877 F.3d 1024 (11th Cir. 2017), while holding that, once knowledge is shown, no intent to defraud is required, Gold Value International Textile, Inc. v. Sanctuary Clothing, LLC, 925 F.3d 1140 (9th Cir. 2019).
• Correct before you enforce. A correction made before any dispute is strong evidence of good faith; one made after a defendant raises the issue looks like an admission.

Part 11: After the certificate issues: protect and enforce

• Compare the certificate with the application and fix any discrepancy promptly.
• Use a copyright notice on the work as a whole. 17 U.S.C. § 401. Do not place a notice on material that is purely AI-generated and sold on its own. See the Copyright Notice Checklist.
• Keep copyright management information intact on the human-authored work; its knowing removal is actionable. 17 U.S.C. § 1202.
• Protect prompts, workflows, and fine-tuned models as trade secrets with reasonable secrecy measures: enterprise platform terms that bar training on your inputs, access controls, confidentiality agreements, and logging. 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3); 18 U.S.C. § 1836. Use the Building a Trade Secret Protection Program Checklist.
• File trademark applications for names, logos, and characters that identify source, whether or not their artwork is copyrightable. 15 U.S.C. § 1051. Trademark law will not stop non-confusing copying of the art itself. Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003).
• Use contracts for counterparties. Licenses and terms of use can restrict copying of unprotected material by those who agree to them, ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996), but terms that simply recreate copyright against the world risk preemption under 17 U.S.C. § 301.
• Before enforcing, map what was copied against what was claimed. If the copied material is all in the excluded column, there is no copyright claim.
• Send takedown notices only for material you own. 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3); knowing misrepresentations create liability under § 512(f), and senders must consider fair use. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 815 F.3d 1145 (9th Cir. 2016). See Filing a DMCA Takedown Notice: A Practical Checklist.
• Choose the forum. Small claims can go to the Copyright Claims Board; see the Copyright Claims Board Filing and Opt-Out Checklist. Larger claims go to federal court under 17 U.S.C. § 501, with remedies under 17 U.S.C. § 504 and § 505. Before filing, run the Copyright Infringement Claim Evaluation Checklist.

Part 12: For the other side: testing an AI-assisted registration in litigation

• Pull the public record and the deposit. The Limitation of Claim shows what was excluded; compare it with what your client used.
• Look for undisclosed AI material. Compare the deposit with the plaintiff's public statements, portfolio posts, platform galleries, and marketing about how the work was made.
• Serve targeted discovery on the creative process: prompt and generation histories, platform exports, layered files, version histories, and communications. Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1); Fed. R. Civ. P. 34. Consider a subpoena to the platform under Fed. R. Civ. P. 45 if the plaintiff's records are thin, and depose the author on the process under Fed. R. Civ. P. 30.
• Raise § 411(b) if the evidence shows a knowing inaccuracy. The court must ask the Register whether the inaccuracy would have caused refusal, 17 U.S.C. § 411(b)(2), but in the Seventh Circuit expect to make a threshold showing first. DeliverMed Holdings, LLC v. Schaltenbrand, 734 F.3d 616 (7th Cir. 2013).
• Filter unprotected material before comparing. Remove AI material, ideas, and stock elements, then compare what remains. Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992). Where little remains, argue thin protection against only virtually identical copying. Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d 805 (9th Cir. 2003).
• Investigate independent creation. Similar prompts to the same model can yield similar outputs without copying.
• Track fee exposure both ways. A prevailing defendant may recover fees under § 505, and so may a plaintiff with a timely registration.

Key authorities at a glance

This document is general information, not legal advice for any particular situation; the law changes, and the facts matter.

Related Documents

Related Articles

• Copyright in AI-Assisted Works: Human Authorship, Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the Copyright Office Guidance: the doctrine behind each item on this list.
• Copyright Infringement Claims Against Generative AI: The New York Times, Getty, and What Comes Next: the separate risk that AI output infringes someone else.
• Copyright Registration for Derivative Works: excluding preexisting material, the same mechanism used for AI material.
• Copyright Ownership, Joint Authorship, and Termination of Transfers: ownership rules for the human layer.

Related Guides

• Registering and Protecting Works Made With Generative AI: A Practical Guide: this checklist as a narrative, with worked examples.
• Copyright Registration of Photographs: photographs edited with generative tools.

Related Checklists

• Copyright Registration Checklist: A Practical Checklist: the general registration routine.
• Work Made for Hire Determination Checklist: A Practical Checklist: employee and contractor ownership.
• Copyright Infringement Claim Evaluation Checklist: A Practical Checklist: screening a claim before you file it.
• Copyright Claims Board Filing and Opt-Out Checklist: A Practical Checklist: small claims on registered works.
• AI Licensing Diligence Checklist: A Practical Checklist: reviewing the tools and terms behind AI-assisted work.

Related Toolkits

• Generative AI Authorship Toolkit: Disclosure Statements, Contribution Logs, and Ownership Clauses: templates for the log, the disclosure, and the contracts.
• Copyright Registration Toolkit: A Roadmap and Research Guide: research resources for registration questions.