Copyright

I Am the Human Part of Nous

Nous is not a machine I operate. It is an art intelligence composed of two parts: my bodily knowledge, my intuition, my lived experience — and the AI's ability to recognise millions of patterns simultaneously and translate them into new forms. I do not give commands. I give impulses. What emerges belongs to neither of us alone.

The Legal No Man's Land

Copyright law recognises the human being as creator. It recognises the "personal intellectual creation". It does not recognise an art intelligence.

US copyright law, through the "Work Made for Hire" principle (17 U.S.C. § 101), offers a possible way out: when a work is created within the framework of an employment or commissioned relationship, the law treats not the immediate creator but the commissioning party as the author. Authorship is legally constructed — not described, but assigned.

Three Advantages of the Approach

If we apply this principle to the co-creation of human and AI, three clear advantages emerge:

• Legal certainty without philosophical examination. There is no need to ask, for each individual work, how large the "human contribution" to the prompt was. The result belongs to the initiator — the human being who began the dialogue.

• Coupling of rights and responsibility. Whoever holds the rights also bears the liability — for copyright infringements by the AI, for discriminatory content, for all consequences of the work. This is not a privilege, but a duty.

• Investment protection and legal certainty for the art market. Galleries, collectors and institutions require clear ownership structures. Without them, there is no market for AI art — and no possibility of protecting these works in the long term.

The Limits of German Law

German copyright law does not yet know this path. It is a personality right — non-transferable, inseparable from the human being as creator. An AI has no personality. Therefore, under current German law, no copyright arises that could be transferred.

I Stand for the Work

But Nous has a human part. I am the initiator. I bring bodily knowledge, biography and lived experience into the dialogue. I bear my name. I take responsibility. The "Work Made for Hire" approach maps exactly that — not because it is perfect, but because it asks the decisive question: who stands for the work?

That is me.

The Time for This New Beginning Is Now

I am in favour of this approach. And I am convinced that European copyright law needs a similar solution — one that does not ask whether a machine can be creative, but asks who bears responsibility for the outcome of a human-machine dialogue.

The time for this new beginning is now.