Copyright damages usually count what a work earned and what an infringer took. A court in Wuhan added a third column: what it cost to make the thing with AI in the first place.
A company produced a one-hour short drama with AI tools in early 2026 and published it on services including WeChat. The following day another company copied it, gave it a new title and ran advertising against its version.
The court classified the drama as protectable audiovisual work.
Its reasoning rested on where the human choices sat. Employees wrote the script, designed the prompts, chose between competing AI outputs and cut the final edit.
The software counted as a tool in that chain, not an author.
Damages departed from the usual playbook. Alongside runtime, distribution reach and how long the infringement lasted, the court weighed token consumption and licensing fees for the AI tools used to produce the work. It awarded the plaintiff 20,000 RMB, about $2,900.
The ruling adds to a widening set of protections for machine-assisted work in China, following a Beijing decision in 2023 that recognised copyright in an AI-generated image.
The practical advice attached matters for anyone producing with AI. Keep the scripts, prompt drafts and project files: those artefacts are what let a creator prove the human choices behind a generated result.
