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Guidance

AI-Assisted Courses and Content: What Does Your Business Actually Own?

AI tools now help draft course outlines, workbook exercises, slide copy, and marketing. That can speed up production. It also raises a question that matters before you license or sell that material: which parts does your business actually own?

Permission to Use Is Not Ownership

Many AI tools' terms say that you may use, or even that you own, the outputs you generate. That is a contract between you and the provider. It does not create copyright where copyright law does not recognize any. Copyright protects original expression by a human author; a provider's terms cannot supply authorship that is missing.

The practical result: you may be free to use AI output, yet unable to stop others from copying the purely machine-generated portions.

What the Copyright Office Has Said

On January 29, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence. The Office concluded that using AI to assist in creating a work, or including AI-generated material in a larger human-authored work, does not by itself bar copyright. Prompts alone, however, do not provide sufficient human control to make the user the author of the output. Human-authored expression that is perceptible in the output, and creative selection, arrangement, or modification of AI material, may qualify depending on the facts. (Source: U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and AI, Part 2 (Jan. 29, 2025))

This is agency guidance, not a new statute or a Supreme Court holding. It reflects how the Office applies existing law in registration decisions. Separately, in Thaler v. Perlmutter the D.C. Circuit affirmed in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires human authorship, and the Supreme Court denied review on March 2, 2026. That case involved a work claimed to be generated entirely by AI, not AI-assisted work. (Source: Supreme Court docket, Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 25-449)

Where Human Authorship Shows Up in a Course

For expert-led businesses, the strongest human contribution is usually the substance and structure: your original explanations, your examples, the sequence of modules, the exercises you designed, and the edits that turn a rough draft into your voice. A workbook you wrote and refined with AI help sits differently from a workbook generated from a single prompt and published unchanged.

Remember, too, that copyright never protects the underlying method or idea itself, only its expression. That limit applies whether or not AI was involved.

Contractors, Assignments, and Work Made for Hire

If contractors create your course materials, ownership depends on the agreement. Work made for hire applies to employees acting within the scope of employment and, for independent contractors, only to certain categories of commissioned works with a signed written agreement. Outside those categories, you generally need a written assignment. (Source: U.S. Copyright Office Circular 30: Works Made for Hire)

Transfers of copyright ownership generally must be in a writing signed by the owner. (Source: U.S. Copyright Act, Chapter 2: Ownership and Transfer)

What to Add to Contractor Agreements

• Disclosure: the contractor tells you when and how AI tools were used.
• Approved tools: which tools may be used, and on what settings.
• Confidentiality: no uploading your unpublished materials or client information into tools that may retain it.
• Third-party material: no inclusion of others' content without rights to use it.
• Ownership: a present assignment of all rights the contractor holds in the deliverables.
• Realistic warranties: promises the contractor can actually make, such as originality of their own contributions, rather than guarantees about machine output nobody can verify.

Keep Records of Human Work

Save outlines, drafts, revision histories, and notes on creative decisions. If ownership is ever questioned, or if you register a work and need to identify AI-generated material, those records show where human authorship lies. The Copyright Office's guidance addresses disclosure of AI-generated content in registration applications. (Source: U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence)

Copyrightability and Infringement Are Separate Questions

Whether you own copyright in a piece of content is a different question from whether that content infringes someone else's rights. AI output can resemble existing material. Review important assets for that risk regardless of how much of the work you authored.

AI-Generated Brand Names Still Need Clearance

If an AI tool suggests a program or product name, it has not checked whether that name is available. Trademark clearance remains a separate step before you invest in the name.

Primary Sources

• U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and AI, Part 2 (Jan. 29, 2025)
• U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
• U.S. Copyright Office Circular 30: Works Made for Hire
• U.S. Copyright Act, Chapter 2: Ownership and Transfer
• Supreme Court docket, Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 25-449

Using AI in your courses or content?

Culture Kept Legal helps expert-led businesses review content ownership, contractor agreements, and licensing terms before AI-assisted material is published, licensed, or scaled.

Official resource: U.S. Copyright Office: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

Related Service

This topic is addressed directly through our Copyright Protection & Ownership service. You can also review the trademark questions from creators and founders or return to the Guidance Library.

Also relevant: IP Strategy & Ownership, Licensing & Certification, Contracts for Expert-Led Businesses.

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