The copyright registration form has a field called Limitation of Claim. That one field decides how much of an AI record the law will call yours.
I sat down to register my work expecting a yes or no question. Is AI music copyrightable. It is not a yes or no question. The Copyright Office splits a song into pieces and asks who made each piece, and the answer changes line by line.
Here is the rule underneath all of it. Copyright protects human authorship. Only that. The Office said it plainly in its guidance, and the courts have backed it: a work with no human author gets no copyright at all. A machine cannot hold one. Neither can the person who only pressed the button.
So the question becomes which pieces of my records are human. The lyrics are. I write every line myself, in English and in Krio, before any sound exists. Lyrics are a literary work and mine are protectable the ordinary way, the same as if I had never touched a model. The album as a shape is too. Nine songs, nine cards, sequenced into one arc. The Office calls that selection and arrangement, and a human choosing what goes where and in what order is authorship it recognizes.
The generated sound itself is the piece the claim cannot cover. When the recording comes out of the model, the Office treats that audio as AI-generated material, and the registration has to disclaim it. You state what the machine made, you exclude it from the claim, and your certificate covers what remains.
Now the part that stopped me.
Prompts do not count. The Office was direct about this in its 2025 report on copyrightability. Describing what you want, in any amount of detail, any number of times, is not authorship of the output. I have thrown away sixty takes of a three minute song. I have rewritten one word and regenerated and listened and rejected, for hours, and the law reads all of that as instructions to a machine, not as making.
I wrote once that the rejections are mine and the rejections are most of the record. I still believe that. The form does not. There is no field for taste. There is no field for the thousand refusals. The law protects what I fixed on the page and how I arranged the whole, and it is silent on the judgment that connected them. I do not think the current rule is the final rule. Curation is authorship in every gallery on earth. But I am not going to pretend the certificate says something it does not say.
What I hold after registering is real and specific. My words are protected. My sequencing is protected. My titles, my art direction, my story bible, the whole architecture around the sound. The raw audio sits outside the fence, and anyone building this way now works with that open gate.
Know exactly which part of your work is yours on paper. Then decide what you are building that no form was ever going to hold.