If you sell cross-border and your product photos are now generated by Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, ask yourself one question: do you actually own them?

China's first AI-generated image copyright case is back in discussion. A user created an image with a text-to-image tool, someone else used it, and the court ruled in the plaintiff's favor — recognizing the AI image as a protectable "work." Notably, the plaintiff barely pursued damages; the point was establishing that the right exists. Plenty of lawyers still disagree with the ruling.

Here's the real debate. Copyright protects a human's original intellectual contribution. The court's reasoning: writing prompts, tuning parameters, and iterating reflects personalized creative choices, so the image belongs to you. Critics say AI output is random — same prompt, different seed, completely different result — so how much does the human really control?

I come from a computer science background and have run these models myself. My read: randomness doesn't erase human choice. Which model you pick, how you build the prompt, which drafts you keep or discard — those decisions stack up. Whether they clear the "originality" bar is a question of degree, not a yes/no switch. That's exactly why these cases have to be judged one at a time.

For cross-border sellers, the real trap is jurisdictional divergence. China leans permissive and will recognize copyright in AI images case by case. The U.S. Copyright Office is far stricter — pure AI-generated content generally isn't registrable. The same image can be your asset in China and effectively public domain in the U.S.

One thing to do now: archive your creation process — prompts, parameters, every draft — organized by product. Whether you later need to establish ownership or fight infringement, that record is the cheapest step you'll ever take, and it's set the day you generate the image.

Which jurisdiction are you protecting your AI assets in? Happy to think it through.

———
Mike Wu, China-licensed Attorney · Cross-border practice
4 languages (CN/EN/ES/JA)
Site: wzklaw.com/contact.php?source=linkedin · Book consultation: wzklaw.com/contact.php?source=linkedin

#CrossBorderLaw #AILaw #Copyright #IPStrategy #EcommerceLaw