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The U.S. Copyright Office has repeatedly held that copyright protects human authorship and does not extend to material generated solely by AI systems. Under that position, human contributions to AI-assisted material—such as creative writing, editing, or selection—may be protectable, while the AI-generated portions are not. Cory Doctorow says this distinction could require companies to document which elements of commercial works were created or altered by people and which were generated by AI. U.S. copyright once required formalities including deposit with the Library of Congress, registration identifying authorship claims, and copyright notice. The 1976 Copyright Act eliminated most formalities as the United States joined the Berne Convention, although registration remains necessary to obtain statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. Copyright now generally arises when an original work is fixed in a tangible medium, and unregistered works can remain protected for the author’s life plus 70 years. Doctorow argues that the lack of a comprehensive registry has made it difficult to identify copyright owners and determine the status of many works. He predicts that businesses using AI will recreate record-keeping requirements privately in order to establish and defend copyright claims over human-authored portions of their products.