AI, copyright and the upload warranty.
Each platform words its upload rights promise differently. The US Copyright Office says what it won't register if a machine authored it. They collide less neatly than claimed.
On 16 March 2023 the US Copyright Office published its policy on registering works that contain AI-generated material. For an image made from a text prompt and nothing else, the answer is that the human did not author it in the sense copyright requires. A seller who uploads that image to a print-on-demand platform signs a promise about rights at the same moment. Whether the two collide depends on the words of the promise, and the platforms do not use the same words.
What the Copyright Office says
The 2023 policy statement says that when an AI system receives solely a prompt, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the system; prompts “function more like instructions to a commissioned artist”. A human’s creative selection, arrangement or modification can still be protected, and copyright then covers only that human part. The Office’s January 2025 report adds that “prompts do not alone provide sufficient control”, and records that it had registered hundreds of works containing AI material, each covering the human contribution.
In Thaler v. Perlmutter the district court held on 18 August 2023 that “human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim”, and the Supreme Court denied review on 2 March 2026. The claimant listed a machine as the author, so the case says nothing about images a human prompted.
Sources: Federal Register, 88 FR 16190 (16 Mar 2023) · Copyright Office, Part 2: Copyrightability (Jan 2025) · Thaler v. Perlmutter, district court opinion · Supreme Court docket 25-449
What the platforms ask a seller to promise
Printful’s print file content policy says that when you upload a file you confirm that you have “the rights to use, sell, and distribute that content” and take full responsibility for it. It does not use the word own.
Printify’s terms of service, updated on 17 September 2026, are stronger. The seller warrants that content posted is owned by them or that they hold all necessary rights, including authorisation from the owner. Printify then carves out one case. For AI-generated content made available through Printify’s own AI tools, the ownership, authority and non-infringement warranties do not apply. The seller instead represents that they have reviewed the content and are legally permitted to use it, and Printify says it makes no representation that any rights in that content exist. That carve-out covers output from Printify’s tools. A file generated elsewhere and uploaded falls under the ordinary warranty.
Sources: Printful print file content policy · Printify terms of service
Where the verdicts land
Four verdicts bear on this, and they do not all point the same way, so each is stated as it stands.
Verdict 78 rates false the claim that the Copyright Office says Printful’s upload warranty cannot be honoured for prompt-only art. Its reasoning: Printful asks for rights to use, sell and distribute, not for ownership of a registrable copyright, and the Office’s statement concerns registration practice, not platform warranties. Verdict 83 rates false the claim that a seller who uploads a prompt-only AI image can truthfully warrant, as Printful’s policy requires, that they own the rights to it, because the Office’s position is that no human-authored rights arise in such output. The two verdicts read the same Printful sentence differently. The first treats it as narrower than ownership; the second treats it as a promise of ownership. Both ratings are on the register as published.
Correction, 21 October 2026. The two readings were not equally good, and the second was ours to fix. Printful’s policy asks for “the rights to use, sell, and distribute” a file, not for ownership of a copyright, so a seller of a prompt-only image can give the warranty it actually asks for. Verdict 83 is now rated partly true: right that the warranty can be given, wrong that it is a warranty of ownership. Verdict 78 stands.
The Office does not speak to platform warranties. A warranty of ownership, Printify’s wording, sits closer to its position on prompt-only output than Printful’s rights-to-use wording.
Verdict 81 and verdict 82 are rated unverified because the checks read texts cut off before the relevant passage; the ratings stand until they are re-reviewed. Read in full, neither document makes “substantial” editing the test: the question is whether the human’s changes themselves meet the standard, and protection covers only those changes.
Correction, 21 October 2026. Verdict 81 has been re-reviewed against the full Federal Register text and is now confirmed: the statement says a human “may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way” that the work as a whole is original. Verdict 82 is unchanged.
The practical step is small: read the exact sentence of the promise on the platform you use, and keep the prompts and edit history for any file whose authorship you may one day have to describe.
Sources: Federal Register, 88 FR 16190 · Copyright Office, Part 2: Copyrightability · Printful print file content policy · Verdict 78 · Verdict 83 · Verdict 81 · Verdict 82
“upload rights warranty is unhonourable for prompt-only art per the Copyright Office”