A Rule by the Copyright Office, Library of Congress on 03/16/2023 – “The Copyright Office (the “Office”) is the Federal agency tasked with administering the copyright registration system, as well as advising Congress, other agencies, and the Federal judiciary on copyright and related matters. Because the Office has overseen copyright registration since its origins in 1870, it has developed substantial experience and expertise regarding “the distinction between copyrightable and noncopyrightable works.” The Office is empowered by the Copyright Act to establish the application used by applicants seeking registration of their copyrighted works. While the Act identifies certain minimum requirements, the Register may determine that additional information is necessary for the Office to evaluate the “existence, ownership, or duration of the copyright.”  Because the Office receives roughly half a million applications for registration each year, it sees new trends in registration activity that may require modifying or expanding the information required to be disclosed on an application. One such recent development is the use of sophisticated artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies capable of producing expressive material.[5] These technologies “train” on vast quantities of preexisting human-authored works and use inferences from that training to generate new content. Some systems operate in response to a user’s textual instruction, called a “prompt.” The resulting output may be textual, visual, or audio, and is determined by the AI based on its design and the material it has been trained on. These technologies, often described as “generative AI,” raise questions about whether the material they produce is protected by copyright, whether works consisting of both human-authored and AI-generated material may be registered, and what information should be provided to the Office by applicants seeking to register them…”