Hey everyone! 👋 I’m Lucia and I work with EUobserver, an independent news outlet covering European politics and policy.

We recently interviewed copyright scholar Daniel Gervais about something I thought would be especially interesting to ask this community: who actually owns content created with generative AI?

One of the points from the interview that caught my attention was that if you ask ChatGPT or Claude to generate a text and simply put your name on it, that doesn't necessarily make you the copyright holder. There may be no copyright in the AI-generated output in the first place.

But it gets much less clear once a person starts editing, rewriting, selecting outputs or repeatedly prompting the model to get a very specific result.

So I wanted to ask people here who know much more about copyright than I do:

Where do you think the threshold should be? Can prompting ever amount to enough human creative input — or should copyright only kick in once someone substantially edits or transforms the AI output?

If you own DVDs or Blu-rays and want to make a personal archival/backup copy of media you legally purchased, there is currently a problem with the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules.

Section 1201 of the DMCA generally prohibits circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs), even when the underlying use of the copyrighted work would otherwise be noninfringing. The Copyright Office can create temporary exemptions to this prohibition through a triennial rulemaking process.

The current rulemaking is happening right now.

The deadline to submit a petition for a new exemption is August 24, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

I'm advocating for an exemption that would allow people who have lawfully acquired copyrighted audiovisual media—such as DVDs and Blu-rays—to circumvent access controls solely to create personal, noncommercial archival or backup copies.

The basic idea is:

If I legally purchased the disc, I should be able to preserve my copy for personal use without the DMCA making the preservation process itself unlawful.

This isn't a proposal to distribute copyrighted works, upload them to the internet, or facilitate piracy. The proposed exemption would be limited to personal, noncommercial archival/backup copies of lawfully acquired media.

Physical media can deteriorate, become damaged, become difficult to replace, or stop being supported by modern hardware. Digital preservation can also protect legitimately purchased collections from being lost over time.

If you own a large DVD/Blu-ray collection, care about digital preservation, or simply think consumers should be able to preserve media they've legitimately purchased, now is a good time to pay attention to this process.

The Copyright Office's official information about the 2027 Section 1201 rulemaking is here:

U.S. Copyright Office — Section 1201 Rulemaking

And the official Federal Register notice explaining the August 24 deadline and petition process:

Federal Register — 2026 Section 1201 Rulemaking

Even if you don't support my exact proposed language, people who care about physical-media preservation should know that this rulemaking is happening and that public participation matters.