01 · What the Copyright Office Protects
Yes, you can register music you made with Suno, Udio, or any other AI tool. But you can only protect the parts a human made. That sounds limiting. It isn't. Most working artists using AI tools are contributing far more human authorship than they realize.
Copyright law requires a human author. That principle was tested and confirmed in Thaler v. Perlmutter. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on March 2, 2026, leaving the human authorship requirement firmly in place.
Things that count as human authorship:
- Lyrics you wrote
- Melodies you composed, hummed, or played
- Chord progressions and song structure you decided
- Arrangement choices you made
- Vocals or instruments you performed
- Production and mixing decisions you made
- Substantive edits to AI output — rewriting lines, changing sections, restructuring
Things that do not count on their own:
- Writing a prompt, no matter how detailed
- Selecting from AI-generated options without modifying them
- Accepting AI output as delivered
Prompting is not authoring. But prompting plus real creative work is a different situation entirely, and that's where most artists actually live.