Logos made with AI are not protected: what the Munich judgment means for creators

A two-line prompt, a prompt of 1,700 characters and a few manual tweaks. For the Amtsgericht München, all three fell short: the logos a business owner had made with AI were not protected by copyright. What does the court ask of creators who work with AI, and how do you prove your own input?

A business owner has three logos made with generative AI and puts them on their website. Someone else copies them. The business owner goes to court, and loses. On 13 February 2026 the Amtsgericht München (Munich Local Court) held, in case number 142 C 9786/25, that none of the three logos was protected by copyright.

If you design, write or compose with AI, this judgment makes concrete how much of your own input is needed and how you prove it.

Three logos, three times too little human input

The logos showed an open book with a section sign above a laptop, an envelope in front of a column, and two clasped hands beneath a bell. The court looked at how each logo had come about.

For the first logo the maker had used a two-line prompt asking for a simple but unusual logo. According to the court, that left the AI far too much room. The prompt for the second logo ran to some 1,700 characters, but length did not help, because the descriptions were too general to really determine the outcome. For the third logo the maker had made a few manual changes afterwards, but those small changes did not give the result a creative shape.

Choosing between AI suggestions is not a creative choice

The court restated the starting point that applies in the Netherlands too: copyright protects an author’s own intellectual creation, made up of a human’s free and creative choices. AI may be a tool in that process, but not the author itself.

Two things many creators do regard as creative work did not count. Picking the best of a series of AI suggestions is not enough, the court said. Nor is putting time, effort or money into the result, because copyright protects creative choices and not investment.

Whoever claims copyright must prove how the work came about

At least as important is the burden of proof. Anyone relying on copyright has to show that a protected work exists, which for work made with AI means demonstrating which choices were yours. The business owner in Munich did describe how the logos were made, but that was not enough.

A judgment of the Landgericht Frankfurt of 17 December 2025 (case number 06 O 401/25) shows the other side. There, song lyrics the claimant had written herself remained protected, even though the music was made with AI. She gave a sworn statement on how the lyrics came about. That was enough in interim injunction proceedings, although the bar is likely to be higher in full proceedings on the merits.

What the Munich judgment means in the Netherlands

A judgment of a German local court does not bind a Dutch court, and it is a single first-instance decision. But the standard for copyright protection comes from EU law and is the same in the Netherlands, so a Dutch court assessing an AI logo will ask the same questions.

Three things you can do now.

• Keep your prompts, sketches and interim versions, with dates. They show which choices were yours.
• Steer the AI with concrete instructions on form, composition and colour, and develop the result substantially yourself.
• If you really want to protect a logo, consider a trade mark registration. It does not depend on whether copyright subsists in the logo.

Read more about copyright in work made with AI.