The line German courts are now drawing
Three German decisions in late 2025 and early 2026 addressed a single question that matters to every owner who uses generative tools: can content made with AI be owned at all. The Munich Local Court, in case 142 C 9786/25 dated 13 February 2026, denied copyright to three logos generated from text prompts. The Frankfurt Regional Court (2-06 O 401/25) and the Duesseldorf Court of Appeal (I-20 W 2/26) examined the same boundary from other angles. Together they form the first body of German guidance on whether AI output is protected.
The test is not German invention. It comes from EU law, where a protected work must reflect the author's own free and creative choices, a standard the Court of Justice set out in cases such as Cofemel and Painer. Section 2(2) of the German Copyright Act says the same thing in plainer words: protection attaches to a personal intellectual creation. A human mind, not a machine, must have shaped the result in a way that can be seen in the result itself.
Why a prompt alone is not enough
The Munich court was direct. For AI output to be protected, the human contribution must dominate the result so completely that the work can be seen as the person's own creation, and the AI must sit 'closer to a mere tool than to an independent instrument of creation.' Open-ended instructions, however numerous or iterative, hand the real design decisions to the model. The court was explicit that neither money spent, nor time, nor diligence, nor light fine-tuning afterward earns protection. Copyright rewards creative authorship, not effort or budget.
This is the part owners tend to miss. If your team types a brief into an image or text generator and ships the output, the marketing asset, the design, or the copy may carry no copyright at all. It is not yours in any way the law will defend. A competitor can lift it, reuse it, and sell against you with it, and you have no claim to stop them. The same logic reaches code, brand visuals, and product content generated the same way.
What an owner should do about it
The fix is not to abandon AI. It is to make and record genuine human authorship around it. That means concrete creative choices a person can later demonstrate: detailed direction, specific reference material, selection and arrangement of elements, and substantive human editing of the output rather than cosmetic touch-ups. Where a person clearly shapes the final result, protection becomes arguable. Where the model decides, it does not.
The discipline is documentary as much as creative. Keep the human decisions on record so that, if a competitor copies an asset, you can show a court who authored it and how. For a business that builds its market position on its marketing, designs, and content, this is not a legal footnote. It is the difference between an asset you can defend and one anyone is free to take.
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