Artificial intelligence has moved from an experimental curiosity to a routine feature of the creative and professional process – drafting text, generating images, assisting research, and increasingly co authoring the very works that copyright law was designed to protect.
Yet the question at the heart of this article remains strikingly unsettled: when a work is created with, or by, an AI system, who actually owns it?
This is not a marginal or theoretical question. It sits at the intersection of authorship, originality, and economic exploitation, and the answer varies significantly depending on where a business, creator, or client happens to be operating. Some jurisdictions insist on a human author as a precondition for protection; others have carved out statutory space for computer generated works with no human author at all; others still are actively rewriting their rules in real time as generative AI reshapes the creative economy. For any organisation operating across borders, this divergence is a genuine commercial and legal risk – content that is protectable in one market may fall into the public domain in another.
To make sense of this landscape, I asked my colleagues across the AEA network, to which Studio Peluso Avvocati belongs, to help me address the same five questions for their respective jurisdictions: the national copyright framework and how AI generated works are currently treated; the relevant legislation and case law shaping authorship and originality; the jurisdiction’s overall approach to ownership; the practical implications for companies, individuals, and clients; and the direction of future reform.
Opening with Italy, my own jurisdiction, the article travels through my colleagues’ contributions, moving continent by continent from Europe to Asia to North America, alphabetically within each. I am grateful to our colleagues across the world for lending their expertise to this comparative exercise.
Avv. S. Giulia Peluso
