AI-assisted art can be yours. If you can show your hand in it.
Around the world, copyright protects human authorship, not machine output. What the artist contributes is protected; a prompt alone mostly isn’t. Mirva records the human input as you work, every stroke, every input, every version, so the authorship is on record, not a matter of memory.
The legal landscape
The rules differ by country, but they share one idea: protection follows human creative input, and the evidence of that input matters.
United States
Only human authorship is protected. Prompts alone are not enough.
The Copyright Office’s 2025 report on copyrightability concludes that prompts alone don’t give enough control over the output to make the prompter its author. What is protectable: your own expressive input when it is perceptible in the result (for example your drawing, carried through a generation), your modifications of AI output, and your creative selection and arrangement. AI-generated material must be disclosed when registering, and the courts have confirmed that a work needs a human author.
A work must be the author’s own intellectual creation.
EU courts protect works that reflect the author’s free and creative choices. Output with no human creative choices behind it doesn’t meet that test. Separately, the AI Act’s transparency duties (from August 2026) require AI-generated content to be marked as such, so knowing what was made by whom matters more, not less.
A special rule for “computer-generated” works, now under review.
UK law has long protected computer-generated works with no human author, crediting the person who made the arrangements for their creation. The government has consulted on whether to keep that rule; meanwhile, works with real human creative input stand on the ordinary footing of human authorship.
Protection where the human’s intellectual input shows.
In 2023 the Beijing Internet Court protected an AI-assisted image because the creator’s choices and adjustments, documented step by step, showed their intellectual input. The evidence of the process decided the case.
Beijing Internet Court, Li v. Liu (Nov 2023)
What this means for artists: the parts you draw, paint and decide are yours. The more of the work that is visibly your input, and the better you can show it, the stronger your claim.
The hard part is proof
Authorship is decided on evidence. A finished image says nothing about how it was made. Loose work-in-progress files, screenshots and memory are weak, easy to lose, and hard to tie to the final piece, especially when an AI step sits in between.
Mirva keeps the record as you work
Every stroke
Each brush, pencil and eraser stroke is recorded on the canvas it was drawn on, with who drew it and when. LENS: 45,427 strokes by hand, canvas by canvas.
Every generation’s inputs
When Mirva generates, it records what went in: which of your canvases, which skill and lore, which model, what you asked for. The result points back to your drawing.
Every version
Canvases keep their history, so the sketch, the overpaint and the final are versions of one piece of work, not unrelated files.
Who did what
Your strokes and Mirva’s passes are kept apart: what you drew, what you directed, what the model produced, and what you changed afterwards.
One piece of LENS, on record
✎ 80 strokes
The artist poses the crew
✎ 98 strokes
Lit as a group, by hand
Mirva
Mirva sets the scene around them
Final
The frame the artist chose
From the crew’s scene in LENS: the artist’s drawing with its strokes, Mirva’s passes with their model and inputs, and the frame the artist chose, all on one board, with their history.
What it takes: make it in Mirva
The record is complete when the work happens on the board. Sketch on a Mirva canvas, direct Mirva from that canvas, paint over the result in Mirva, and every link of the chain is there.
Draw your sketches on Mirva canvases. Strokes made in another app aren’t on record; a sketch pasted in starts its record at the paste.
Send Mirva your canvas, not a screenshot of it. Then the generation points back to your drawing.
Overpaint and correct in Mirva. Your changes to AI output are protectable, and they are recorded.
Keep your explorations on the board. The paths not taken show the creative choices behind the one you kept.
Questions
Does Mirva guarantee that my work is copyrighted?
No tool can: copyright offices and courts decide. What Mirva gives you is the evidence of your human input, recorded as you worked rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Is a detailed prompt enough?
In the U.S., the Copyright Office’s view is that prompts alone don’t make you the author of the output. Your drawing as the input, your edits and your arrangement are what count. That is how Mirva is built: the brush stroke is the prompt.
What about work I made before, or in other apps?
Bring it in and keep working in Mirva. Everything from the moment it’s on the board is recorded; what happened before stays with the files you made it in.
This page summarizes the legal landscape as of mid-2026 for general information. It is not legal advice, and the law in this area is changing; for a specific work, ask a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
