Wuhan court counts AI production costs in copyright damages

The work behind the output

In early 2026, a company used AI tools to create a one-hour short drama and published it on platforms including WeChat. A day later, another company copied the work, changed its title and added advertising.

The court classified the drama as a protected audiovisual work. Its reasoning turned on the employees’ creative choices at each stage: writing the script, developing prompts, selecting AI outputs and completing the edit. The AI, the court said, was a tool in that process.

China has recognized copyright protection for AI-assisted work before. In 2023, a Beijing court recognized copyright in an AI-generated image. The Wuhan ruling extends that direction from whether such work can be protected to how a remedy for copying might be calculated.

What went into the damages

The court considered production costs related to AI alongside more familiar factors: the work’s length, its distribution reach and how long the infringement lasted. It awarded the plaintiff 20,000 yuan, about $2,900, and recommended that creators retain scripts, prompt drafts and project files.

Those records matter because the ruling’s human-authorship logic depends on showing where creative decisions were made. The recommendation points toward a practical burden for creators: preserving evidence of the process may help establish both the work’s protectable character and the effort behind it.

I think the more consequential part is not that AI costs now appear in the calculation, but that the court tied protection to a documented chain of human choices. The award was 20,000 yuan; the decision does not say how much of that amount reflected AI-related production costs, or how the court valued them.

That leaves a gap between recognizing the cost category and making it predictable. Creators are being told to keep the evidence, but the ruling offers no formula for turning that evidence into compensation.