AI logos
have no
Copyright protection.
AI logos
have no
Copyright protection.
from
Who has laws on a logo created with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or other AI tools? Can you exclude others from using it? And is it enough to have invested a lot of time in the right prompts?
What is it all about?
The Munich Local Court has ruled: Three logos created with artificial intelligence do not enjoy copyright protection. The plaintiff had created the graphics with the help of a generative AI and used them on his website. An acquaintance copied the logos for his own website without permission. The plaintiff then demanded an injunction and deletion, but without success.
The three logos showed a handshake with a bell, an envelope in front of a pillared building and a laptop with a floating law book. The plaintiff had them created by giving detailed instructions (so-called “prompts”) to the AI, sometimes in several revision steps.
The court’s decision
The court dismissed the action with Judgment of 13.02.2026 – Ref. 142 C 9786/25 off. The central question was whether a logo created with AI can be a copyrighted work?
The court affirms this, but only under strict conditions. The decisive factor is whether, despite the automated creation process, the personal creative work of the person is reflected in the result.
The input must ultimately shape the resulting output in a sufficiently objective and clearly identifiable manner.
No protection for the specific logos
Even if the court considers protection to be possible under narrow conditions, the court rejected copyright protection for all three logos as protectable works.
Only a two-line description was entered for the laptop logo. There was no recognizable creative development of his personality.
For the envelope logo, an elaborate prompt with 1,700 characters was created. But the time spent alone does not constitute a creative achievement. The descriptions were too general (“modern, minimal, distinctly original”) or left the decision to the AI (“use waves, motion lines, rays or unfolding shapes”). The court compared this to a “written assignment to a human developer”.
For the handshake logo, several steps were taken, errors were corrected and detailed instructions were given. But here too, technical corrections (“those fingers must be white skinned”) and general instructions (“make the bell look more artistic”) predominated. The artistic design was ultimately left to the AI.
The legal standards
The court was guided by the European concept of a work. A work protected by copyright must reflect the personality of its author through free creative decisions.
In the case of AI-generated content, it depends on the extent to which human creative influence is still exercised despite the software-controlled process. This is possible through:
- Sufficient individual default settings for programming
- targeted selection process among several drafts
- Subsequent creative editing
However, this is not sufficient:
- the mere selection of a proposal from several AI results
- General, open-ended instructions
- pure time and effort required for prompting
- Technical corrections of obvious errors
Copyright law does not reward and protect investment, time or hard work, but only the result of a creative activity.
Conclusion
The question of copyright protection for AI-generated content is controversial. It is generally agreed that content generated exclusively with AI does not enjoy copyright protection.
The AG Munich does not fundamentally question this either, but opens a door as to when results based on such creative and precise prompts could enjoy protection.
In practice, however, the distinction will remain difficult. When is a prompt so detailed and creative that it sufficiently shapes the result? There is a blurred line between simply giving an order to the AI and genuine creative control.
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