Source: The Legal 500

The piece compares how Italy, Ukraine and China address copyright for generative AI outputs, focusing on authorship and protection regimes. Italy enacted Law 132/2025, in force on 10 October 2025, integrating EU Regulation 2024/1869 (13 June 2024), and amended Article 25 of Law No. 633/1941 to reaffirm that copyright protects works of human intellectual creation even when created with the aid of AI tools, provided they are the result of the author’s intellectual effort. That amendment expressly confirms protection for AI‑assisted works where meaningful human creative control exists and implicitly excludes fully autonomous AI‑generated outputs that lack human intellectual effort. Under Italy’s approach, AI functions as a creative tool but cannot be recognised as an author.

Ukraine adopted a sui generis regime in 2022 amending its Copyright Law to protect outputs generated without human involvement as non‑original objects produced by a computer program, subject to two criteria in Art. 33(1): novelty relative to similar objects and generation without direct human participation. Sui generis protection in Ukraine lasts 25 years from 1 January following creation, covers only economic rights (excluding moral rights), and may vest in parties connected to the AI system such as initiators, developers or licensees. China relies on judicial interpretation and case‑by‑case assessment of human intellectual contribution, exemplified by Li Yunkai v. Liu Yuanchun (Beijing Internet Court, 2023) where the court found that a user’s prompts, layout and iterative refinements conferred sufficient originality for copyright protection of an AI‑generated image. The Changshu People’s Court in 2025 reinforced that users exercising deliberate creative control may qualify as authors, and Chinese courts emphasise transparency and good faith disclosure of AI usage. The article concludes that all three jurisdictions share the principle that AI systems are not recognised as legal authors and that protection hinges on human intellectual contribution. It observes that divergent mechanisms—Italy’s human‑authorship rule, Ukraine’s sui generis right, and China’s judicially driven tests—underscore a lack of international harmonisation and the need for clearer standards and transparency as generative AI advances.