Can You Copyright a Song Made With AI? How to Prove the Parts That Are Yours

Can you copyright a song made with AI? Partly. In the US and Australia, copyright protects what a human created: lyrics you wrote, a melody you sang, your own recordings, and real creative edits or arrangement. A track generated from a prompt alone is very unlikely to be protected. So if you write with AI tools, the practical job is keeping a dated record of which parts came from you.

Disclosure: I’m Inna Hall, an Australian lawyer and co-founder of TimeBinder, which is mentioned below. This is general information, not legal advice. The law on AI and copyright is still moving and differs between countries, so get advice on your own situation.

What US law says

The US position is the clearest. In January 2025 the US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and AI, which deals with whether AI outputs can be protected. Its main conclusions are worth reading in full, but for songwriters three stand out:

• Using AI “to assist rather than stand in for human creativity” doesn’t stop a work being protected.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, and “prompts do not alone provide sufficient control” with today’s tools.
• Human authors keep copyright in their own work that is “perceptible in AI-generated outputs”, and in creative selection, arrangement or modification of those outputs.

The courts agree. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held in March 2025 that copyright requires a human author, and on 2 March 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving that ruling in place.

If you register a song in the US, the Copyright Office’s registration guidance asks you to identify the human-authored parts and exclude AI-generated material that is more than trivial. That means you need to know, and be able to show, which parts are which.

What Australian law says

Australia has no copyright register. Copyright is free and automatic, as our guide to copyrighting a song in Australia explains. There is no Australian court decision on an AI-generated song yet. But Australian courts, in cases like IceTV v Nine Network in the High Court and Telstra v Phone Directories in the Full Federal Court, have required independent intellectual effort by identifiable human authors. As an International Bar Association overview puts it, that “points strongly to the conclusion that purely AI-generated outputs attract no copyright protection in Australia”. How much prompting, selecting and editing is enough is still untested.

The government is looking at it. In October 2025 the Attorney-General announced consultation on clarifying how copyright applies to material generated using AI, and ruled out a text and data mining exception for AI training.

For royalties, APRA AMCOS’s current advice is that “for copyright to exist in a work, it needs to be an original work created by a human”. If you created an original work with the help of AI tools, you can register it as usual and list yourself as the composer or lyricist.

Which parts of an AI-assisted song are yours

Think about the song as layers rather than one file. The layers most likely to be yours are:

• Lyrics you wrote, even if you later fed them into a tool.
• A melody or topline you sang, played or wrote down before or outside the tool.
• Your own recordings: vocals, guitar, keys, anything you performed.
• Real creative changes to AI output: rewriting sections, re-recording parts, rearranging the structure.

The layers least likely to be yours are the ones the tool decided: a backing track, melody or lyric it generated from your prompt. Separately, the tool’s own terms decide what you’re allowed to do with its output. For Suno, that now depends on your plan and your downloads, which we cover in who owns your AI music under Suno’s terms.

The real problem: showing which parts came from you

When everything ends up in one mixed file, nobody can tell by listening which line you wrote and which line the tool suggested. If a distributor, a co-writer or someone with a similar track ever questions it, your answer is your history: what existed before the AI was involved, and what you changed afterwards.

IP Australia gives the same advice. Its guidance on using AI to create IP suggests keeping “notes about what you planned, the prompts that you used, and what you chose or edited yourself, so you can clearly distinguish between what you created and what the AI model created.”

The weak point is the dates. File dates on a laptop can be changed in seconds, and that is exactly what the other side will say. The same problem comes up in human-only disputes, as our post on how to prove you wrote a song first shows.

What to keep when you write with AI

1. Your lyrics before they go in. Save the draft as a file before pasting it into any tool.
2. Your melody idea. A rough voice memo of the topline is enough.
3. A prompt log. A plain text file of the prompts and settings you used, with the date.
4. The AI output exactly as downloaded, before you edit it, plus a note of your plan at the time.
5. Your own work on top. Your recorded parts, stems and the DAW project, collected and zipped.
6. A split sheet if anyone else was involved. Our free split sheet generator takes a few minutes, and you can note that AI tools were used.

Then date each stage independently, not just the finished master. A run of dated versions tells the story of how the song was made.

What a timestamp does, and doesn’t, do

This is the part we do at TimeBinder, so I’m biased. A TimeBind records each file’s SHA-256 fingerprint with an independent, verifiable timestamp, and you get a certificate anyone can check. It’s an AI-proof record of when. Files are hashed in your browser and never uploaded, so unreleased songs stay private. One TimeBind covers up to 10 files, which fits a lyric draft, voice memo, prompt log, downloaded output and stems in one go. You can check any file’s fingerprint yourself with our SHA-256 file hash checker.

To be clear about the limits: a timestamp shows a file existed in that exact form by a certain time. It doesn’t prove who wrote it, it doesn’t decide which parts are copyright, and it doesn’t create copyright where the law says there isn’t any. It’s one strong piece of evidence alongside your drafts, sessions and split sheets.

The Free plan gives you 1 free Token a month, enough for one Pooled TimeBind, with no credit card required. See pricing or our music copyright proof page for how it fits a music workflow.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Sources were checked on 27 October 2026.