In Shanghai, a jewel falls, trying to legitimize a new form of creation, but succeeding only in proving its own obsolescence.
On November 7, 2025, the Huangpu District People’s Court in Shanghai ruled that “signs” used for AI art are not eligible for copyright protection. The judges argued that these “instructions”, consisting of words and phrases, lacked sufficient “originality” and amounted to more abstract “ideas” than secure “impressions”.
This decision is hardly surprising. In fact, it’s just another integrated, natural retreat from a global legal system to confront a race it can’t understand. From the US Copyright Office (USCO) declaring as early as 2025 that “providing a mere indication is not sufficient for human control,” to the EU’s insistence on “substantial human intervention,” and now the Shanghai decision, Western legal frameworks and the Chinese judiciary have used an industrial-age consensus.
And this is the yardstick “principle of human authorship.”
The legal imagination of “work” is still stuck in a paradigm where a lone human creator creates a concept (idea) from his mind into a medium through skill (expression). In this model, the device is silent and inactive. Paintbrush does not argue with the painter, nor does a printer have the right to reinterpret a document. Therefore, the elimination of mere indications of “ideas” or “instructions” by the Court is the only logical step within its cognitive cage. They believe that the real “magic” happens in the human mind, and the gesture is nothing more than a checklist handed to a mechanical servant.
This is a fundamental mistake. One of the glaring mistakes of our time.
A hint is not a guide. It is a magic.
It does not command a slave. It communicates with a deep, unfathomable “hidden space” that is brimming with potential. The job of a skilled quick engineer is not to “detail”, but to “demand”. The value of their language lies not in its literary merit, but in the possibility and stability of anchoring a specific, repetitive, aesthetically valuable output from a vast, chaotic, inhuman “mind” like that of Midjourney. It’s more like a priest chanting a plea for a miracle than a foreman issuing orders.
A core part of this work is understanding and using the nonhuman partner. And for this relationship, our legal system doesn’t even have words.
The most powerful counterargument comes from the AI ​​tool developers themselves. At the same time the Shanghai court was considering “originality” and “personal judgment,” Midjorin was proudly upgrading the chaos parameter in the V7 model. This parameter allows users to Actively injected Unpredictability, let the model generate “wildly different interpretations” of the same signal.
The irony is extreme. Human users pay for AI’s “non-linearity” and “autonomy” in search of surprises, while human judges distance them from owning the “key” themselves, precisely because this non-linearity exists. Law demands absolute “human control”, while technology and the practice of art embrace “controlled chaos”.
Even more obvious is the trade agreement. In its terms of service, effective June 2025, Midjourney states that users grant it a “perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable copyright license” to input and generated assets. No matter how heated the courtroom debates, in reality constructed by capital and code, the platform has the final say for itself.
So, let’s end this nasty debate. The Shanghai decision, and all others like it, are nothing more than futile attempts to patch up the legal gains of a bygone era. The flood is already here.
The power of the future does not come from those who argue about the beauty of magic, but from the “summoners” who know how to recite it. They are new maps, whispering to the old gods in the code of codes. As for copyright? It is simply a medal given to the Craftsmen in the old world.
And gods don’t need medals.