A court in Wuhan has included token usage and AI-tool licensing fees when calculating copyright damages for an AI-assisted production. The dispute concerned a one-hour short drama made with AI tools and published on services including WeChat; another company copied it a day later, retitled it, and inserted advertising.
The court treated the drama as a protected audiovisual work because employees made creative choices throughout the process, including writing the script, designing prompts, selecting generated material, and editing the final result. In that reasoning, AI functioned as a production tool rather than the author. The damages calculation also considered conventional factors such as runtime, distribution, and the duration of the infringement.
The plaintiff received 20,000 yuan, roughly $2,900. The court recommended that creators preserve scripts, prompt drafts, project files, and other records that demonstrate human decisions and production expense. The ruling extends a developing line of Chinese cases protecting AI-assisted output, but it does not mean every generated work automatically qualifies. Its practical importance is the recognition that documented compute and software costs can contribute to provable loss alongside evidence of human authorship.