Peru's Copyright Office Rejects Registration of AI-Generated Book, Highlighting Human Authorship Requirement

By Espinosa Bellido Abogados

Peru's National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi) has rejected the registration of a literary work created using ChatGPT, concluding that the application did not meet the legal requirements for copyright protection because it lacked sufficient evidence of human authorship.

According to reports published by Peruvian media and legal publications, the decision was issued in Resolution No. 1111-2025/DDA-INDECOPI. The applicant acknowledged that the book had been generated through ChatGPT and sought copyright registration under Peru's copyright framework. Indecopi determined that the work did not qualify for protection because the creative expression presented for registration could not be attributed to a human author to the extent required by law.

The decision does not establish a general prohibition on using artificial intelligence in the creation of copyrighted works. Instead, it applies traditional copyright principles to a specific set of facts. Under Peru's Copyright Law, as in many other jurisdictions, copyright protects original works resulting from human intellectual creation. The authority concluded that this requirement had not been satisfied in the case before it.

Legal analyses of the resolution indicate that Indecopi distinguished between the use of AI as a creative tool and AI as the primary generator of expressive content. According to those analyses, the authority found that entering prompts into a generative AI system, without demonstrating additional creative intervention that shaped the final expression, was insufficient to establish authorship. The resolution reportedly also noted that substantially similar outputs could be obtained through comparable prompts, weakening the claim that the resulting text reflected an original human intellectual contribution.

The case illustrates an issue that has emerged in copyright systems worldwide following the rapid adoption of generative AI. Existing copyright statutes generally do not recognize artificial intelligence systems as authors. Instead, legal protection depends on identifying a human creator responsible for the original expression embodied in the work.

Different jurisdictions have approached the issue through similar reasoning while applying their own legal standards. Authorities have generally distinguished between works generated autonomously by AI and works in which AI functions as an assistive technology under meaningful human creative control. In the latter scenario, copyright protection may still be available for the human-authored aspects of the work, provided the applicable legal requirements for originality and authorship are met.

The Peruvian decision therefore fits within an emerging body of administrative practice that evaluates AI-assisted works on a case-by-case basis rather than treating all AI-generated content identically. The central legal question is not whether artificial intelligence was used during the creative process, but whether the work submitted for protection embodies sufficient human intellectual creation to qualify for copyright under the relevant legal framework.