German court: a similar motif alone is not theft of a work

The dispute involved an animal photographer who took a distinctive picture of dogs reaching for a toy underwater. Her former business partner fed that photograph into AI software and generated a new image from it. The image later appeared on his company's website. The photographer sued him for copyright infringement. The case went to the Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf, which in April 2026 issued an order with the case number 1-20 W 2/26.

The idea is free

The court found that when artificial intelligence merely adopts a motif, that alone does not infringe copyright, as long as the original's individual creative features were not taken over. The motif itself and the idea behind it are in principle free from protection. The German patent office and the courts also consistently refuse protection to processes driven purely by software, without significant human involvement. Under paragraph 2, subsection 2 of the copyright act, a work must be a "personal intellectual creation". So the line runs not between "by hand" and "by machine", but between a general idea and an individual, recognisable expression.

A lawyer who runs a blog on IT law points out that such a ruling does not mean anything goes. If the model faithfully reproduces a unique arrangement of framing, light and composition, the case may look different. A similar dispute continues in the case of the photographer Robert Kneschke against the LAION association. The argument that models are trained under the data exploration exception was expressly rejected.

Brussels counts and votes

Europe is sorting out the rules at the same time. On 10 March 2026, MEPs adopted by 460 votes to 71, with 88 abstentions, a package of recommendations on protecting works from use by artificial intelligence. Parliament demands that EU copyright law cover all generative AI systems on the single market: the creative sector generates 6.9 percent of the Union's GDP. MEPs want fair pay for the use of protected content and full transparency. Providers and users of models would have to publish a detailed list of the works used for training along with logs of the activity of indexing robots. The idea that AI providers should buy a "global licence" for training in exchange for a one-off flat fee was rejected.

There are also labelling duties. From 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act obliges providers and users of generative tools to mark content in a machine-readable way and label it as artificially generated. In practice, anyone publishing an image from a generator must disclose its origin. Creative scenes reacted nervously: on ArtStation, artwork carrying a slogan against training models on artists' work appeared en masse.