A district court in Wuhan has ruled that a short drama made largely with generative AI is protected by copyright, and when it set damages it counted what the producer spent on AI tokens and tool licences. The Jiang'an District People's Court announced the decision on September 23 as the first copyright case in Hubei Province over an AI-assisted short drama. It awarded the producer RMB 20,000, about $2,900, for losses and reasonable costs. Neither side appealed, so the judgment is final.
The work was a 47-episode micro-drama running about an hour in total. The plaintiff, an unnamed company that plans and produces short dramas, made it in early 2026, registered it with China's National Radio and Television Administration and released it on the Hongguo short-drama app and WeChat Video Channel. A day later a second company reposted the whole series on its own WeChat channel, renamed it from "Cloud Above XX" to "Woman XX", and ran ads during playback. The producer sued for infringement of its right to disseminate the work online, asking for the copying to stop and for compensation.
The real question was whether a series whose images and voices came mostly from AI tools counts as a "work" at all. The court kept the usual test of human originality and looked at the whole production. Staff wrote the script, designed storyboard prompts, picked character and scene material, threw out generated clips that missed the brief, then edited, fixed details and synced sound and subtitles. The pictures and audio were not the product of one automatic run: the team set source images, reworked prompts and rejected results that fell short. Because people steered the output toward a planned concept and controlled the final result, the judges treated the AI as an instrument and the drama as an audiovisual work, as several other lower Chinese courts have done with AI-assisted material.
There was no evidence of actual losses, profits or a licence fee, so the court set statutory damages. It weighed familiar factors such as runtime, reach, release during a peak viewing period, how long the copying lasted and the infringer's fault. It also weighed production cost, and for AI work it included the computing expense of token use and the fees for commercial AI tools.
The judges added that making work with AI through back-and-forth between people and machines is now common. In their view it lowers barriers, speeds up production and widens what artists can express, and protecting qualifying results serves copyright's purpose of encouraging creation.
The court also offered advice. Creators working with AI should keep scripts, prompt drafts, generation logs, project files and proof of first publication to show they are the authors. Users and platforms should not assume AI-made content is free to take, and platform operators are expected to review uploads and remove infringing copies.
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