When the Copyright Office is meant to help you protect and defend your rights, authors should want a strict Register of Copyrights.

I had two Internet conversations on copyright this past week. In one, I commented on a video where the creator of AI-generating software taught authors how to hide AI use. In the other, I explained to a video creator why we want the Register to be aggressive in marking off AI use in an otherwise registrable work. Both videos made the same mistake about where copyright gets decided.

Copyright is an entitlement Congress grants to promote human endeavor under Article I of the Constitution. Courts hold that only a human can be an author. The Copyright Office sits within the Library of Congress, and Congress directed it to examine each claim before registering it. Part of that examination asks you to identify AI-generated material beyond the trivial and exclude it from your claim. For authors who think the Office just takes you at your word and it's the honor system, you are mistaken. The audit comes later, when you least want it.

An author registers so he can enforce his rights against infringers. A timely registration is presumed valid, so the defendant has to knock it down. One way is to assert you used AI and did not disclose it. Then comes discovery: your LLM accounts, chat logs, and drafts, all under oath.

The court sets the AI's output beside your book. Picture a black marker: wherever your text tracks the machine's wording or structure, that passage gets a bar through it. Paraphrasing does not help, because rewording the AI's draft is a trivial variation. What you can still read when the marker stops is what you can enforce. Before you think that's not how it works, in Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney, Judge McMahon read 6,000 pages of romantasy over several months before ruling.

It gets worse for the author who lied. If you knowingly misrepresented the work, the court asks the Register whether they would have refused the application. A yes can void the registration. Without a valid registration the suit ends. It is also a federal crime, though the $2,500 fine is the least of your problems.

A strict Register helps honest authors. A certificate issued after the Office asked about AI and got a straight answer is harder to attack than a rubber stamp. Write the prose yourself, disclose what you did not write, and keep your drafts. The man selling you a way to hide it will not be sitting next to you at the deposition.

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