Court Awards 20,000 Yuan for Copying an AI Short Drama, Counting AI Production Costs in the Damages

The Jiang’an District People’s Court in Wuhan, China, has factored AI production costs into a damages award in a copyright infringement case involving an AI-made short drama. The court ordered a company that had copied the work without permission to pay 20,000 yuan, covering both damages and reasonable expenses. Neither side appealed, so the ruling is final.

Why an AI-made short drama earned copyright protection

The work at issue was a 47-episode short drama whose visuals and audio were generated with AI. Its total running time was roughly one hour. The court recognized it as an audiovisual work protected under copyright law, reasoning that the production team wrote the script, designed the scenes, and was substantially involved in selecting and editing the AI-generated output.

The plaintiff argued that AI had been used as a tool to assist creation. The court examined each stage of the actual production process and assessed the original human choices and expression evident in the finished work. Beyond the mere fact that AI was used, what mattered was how people conceived and completed the work.

How AI production costs entered the damages calculation

The infringing company copied the entire short drama without permission. It then renamed the work and posted it alongside advertising. The court found this to be copyright infringement. However, neither the actual losses, the profits gained by the infringer, nor a licensing fee for the work could be established. The court set the damages by weighing factors such as the length of the work, the scope of its distribution, and the duration of the infringement.

In doing so, it also treated the computing costs of generating the visuals and audio with AI, along with fees for commercial AI tools, as production expenses. In other words, the AI spending incurred while making the work was taken into account, alongside other circumstances, in determining the award. The 20,000 yuan ordered by the court combines damages and reasonable expenses.

Another court in Wuhan had previously recognized copyright in an AI-generated image that a person had conceived and refined. This time the work under review was a short drama made of moving images and sound. Another difference was that computing costs and tool fees were treated as production expenses when calculating damages.

What creators should keep on file

The court advised creators to preserve records that document the creative process, including scripts, drafts of the instructions given to the AI (prompts), generation logs, and original files. The steps the court examined, namely script writing, scene design, and the selection and editing of output, are precisely the stages that show what role a human played in arriving at the finished video.

There is something here worth noting for people in Korea who make videos or images with AI: the court looked at both the human contribution to the creative process and the cost of AI production. How creative processes and production costs will be assessed in future domestic cases is a question worth watching.