Copyright Protection of AI-Generated Output: The Headnotes of the Local Court of Munich (142 C 9786/25)

A recent judgment of the Local Court (Amtsgericht, AG) of Munich (final judgment of 13 February 2026 – 142 C 9786/25) clarifies the requirements for copyright protection of output created by means of generative artificial intelligence. The court's headnotes summarise them concisely:

1. Whether output generated by artificial intelligence has the character of a work within the meaning of § 2(2) of the German Copyright Act (UrhG) depends on the extent to which human creative influence is still exercised despite the software-controlled process.

2. Copyright protection is therefore conceivable as a result of human intervention in AI results, which may also take place subsequently or successively during prompting and which leads to the output reflecting precisely the personality of the person prompting.

3. However, the human influence must shape the resulting output in a sufficiently objective and clearly identifiable manner. This is the case at any rate, but also only, where the creative elements that have flowed into the prompting dominate the output to such an extent that the object as a whole can be regarded as the author's own original creation.

Consequence for practice: anyone wishing to derive their own rights from results obtained by generative AI must document them well. In doing so, it must be worked out where the human influence and the human creative contribution lay.