// wiki · case analysis · September 2026

Who owns an AI generation

Draft article. Case No. 02-4220/2025, Presnensky District Court of Moscow; the case status and higher instances — verify in the court register.

The short answer

Under the first Russian decision in such a dispute — an image created entirely by a neural network at a user's request is not protected by copyright in itself: there is no human author. Protection is possible where a person makes a creative contribution to the result that can be proven. While practice is scarce, rights to generations for business are assembled by contract, not by law alone.

What the court decided

In case No. 02-4220/2025 the claimant sought compensation for the use of neural network images. The court dismissed the claim, fixing three positions:

• The court recognised the creator of the generation as the computer program, not the human user: according to the expert's conclusion, the objects were made with the help of artificial intelligence, and the claimant's contribution was limited to requests (Article 1228 of the Civil Code — results of intellectual activity are protected only if created by a person's creative labour).
• Creative contribution not proven — therefore the objects are not independent objects of copyright, and their use violates no one's rights (Articles 1255, 1270 of the Civil Code).
• A prompt is a technical action: the commands the user gives the model were assessed by the court as simple mechanical operations; edits and refinements of the request did not create a creative contribution.

The court separated the request to the neural network from creativity: the user sets the task, the program creates the result. What human contribution to a generation would be sufficient for protection — the decision does not fix; the question is left to future cases.A restatement of the court's position, not a verbatim quote — case No. 02-4220/2025

Why the prompt did not help

Article 1228 of the Civil Code names as the creator of a result only the citizen whose creative labour created it. The court separated the tool from the author: the ability to “ask the model” does not make the user the author of what the model produced — just as buying a camera does not make one the author of every photo the manufacturer's camera takes. Importantly, the court did not close the door: the criterion of how much and what kind of human contribution suffices was not formulated and will remain the subject of future disputes.

When protection is still possible

• Human reworking. If a designer substantially reworks the result on top of the generation, the reworked variant may be protected — with proof of the contribution: source files, versions, descriptions of decisions.
• Composite works and collections. Systematising and selecting material can be protected as compilation (Article 1260 of the Civil Code) — even where the elements themselves are not protected.
• Protected parts nearby. The logo, interface, texts and code around the generations are protected under the general rules — an “unprotected picture” does not infect the whole product.

Idea and form

In the same case the court recalled the distinction from para. 5 of Article 1259 of the Civil Code: copyright protects the form of a work, not the idea. The concept “tousled hair, a glass of wine in hand, the torch of the Statue of Liberty replaced by a glass” the court called repeatedly used — copying an idea does not mean infringing a right. For generations this works even more strictly: even a successful prompt-concept is legally closer to an idea than to a form.

What a company should do

• Assemble the rights by contract. Who and on what terms may use generations created by employees and contractors is fixed in the contract and a local act; the platform's terms are also part of this chain (most services describe rights to generations in their user agreement).
• Record the creative contribution. Keep prompts, intermediate versions, the designer's edits — these are the evidence for a future dispute over a reworking.
• Protect the brand separately. For designations that must “belong” to the company without disputes about authorship, the instrument is a trademark, not copyright.
• Do not build exclusivity on a bare generation. If a competitor copies an indistinguishable generation, claims against them will be hard to make — build value in the protected layers: code, texts, design system, the mark.

Checking the chain of rights to content in a product is part of technology rights practice; the team reviews the terms of a specific platform after an enquiry.