This is an opinion. It is not legal advice, and it will not tell you how a particular case comes out. The question I keep returning to is older than any music tool: when someone makes something, what, exactly, did they make theirs?
Locke and the work of your hands
John Locke's answer, in the Second Treatise of Government, is usually called the labor theory of property. In Chapter V, Section 27, he writes: "The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his." A person owns their labor. If they mix that labor with something that was sitting in common, Locke says, they can take the result out of the common, because the labor was theirs to begin with.
He does not leave it as "finders keepers." The same section adds a limit: there must be "enough, and as good, left in common for others." Later he uses a river as a picture. Drinking a draught does not injure anyone if the river is still there. Take the whole river, and the story changes.
A finished recording is easy to tell in Locke's language. Someone sat in a room, sang, played, edited, and mixed their labor with a particular song. The file is the thing they joined their work to. A style is a bad fit for the same story. Nobody fenced off "the blues," or a falsetto, or the feeling of a slow song at night, and left too little for the next musician. Those patterns stay in the river. People learn them by listening. The listening is the common.
That is why "you copied my style" and "you copied my song" are different sentences. The first one is often true as a feeling and weak as a property claim. The second one can be checked against a specific melody, lyric, or recording. Locke's test asks you to point at the labor. A vibe does not have edges you can point at. A take does.
Originality is not "nobody has ever felt this"
American copyright uses a narrower word than "new." In Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. (1991), the Supreme Court said originality means the work was independently created by the author and has at least a minimal degree of creativity. Effort by itself, the old "sweat of the brow" idea, was not enough. An alphabetical list of phone-book names failed the test.
Read that next to a style. A genre, a tempo, a drum pattern that "feels like summer," a request to sound lonely: those are closer to ideas than to a particular expression. Copyright has long left ideas in the common, even when someone worked hard to become associated with them. What it has traditionally covered is a specific expression: this lyric, this melody as written, this recording. You can arrive at a similar feel on your own and still be original under Feist's test. You cannot claim the feel itself just because you worked at it.
Authorship still needs a person
The U.S. Copyright Office said the same thing again, in plainer operational language, in Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025). A few of its conclusions, paraphrased:
- Using AI to assist, rather than to stand in for human creativity, does not remove copyright protection.
- Copyright protects the original expression a human author created, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
- Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or to material where the person did not have enough control over the expressive elements.
- With current generally available tools, the Office's view is that prompts alone do not provide that control.
- A human can still claim the expression they made that shows up in an output, and a creative selection, coordination, arrangement, or modification of the output.
Whether a given track clears that line is case by case. The Office said existing law can handle it, and that it was not recommending a new kind of ownership for generated output. I am not going to stretch that into a rule the report does not state. The useful part for a working artist is the distinction. Assistance is not the same thing as substitution. A prompt is not, by itself, the song.
So is a style property?
Not on Locke's terms, once you notice that a style stays in the river. Not on Feist's terms, once you notice that originality attaches to a particular expression and not to sweat or to a mood. And not as a new deed from the Copyright Office, which is still looking for a human author's expression.
What you can own, when the facts support it, is the work you can point to. Who wrote the words. Who sang them. Who chose the take. What a tool generated, and whether a person then changed it enough that the change is theirs. That is a labor question in Locke's plain sense: the work of your hands, named.
It is also why a label is not a philosophy prize and not a fence around a genre. Human, AI-assisted, or Fully AI is a sentence about who did the work. Say that sentence honestly. Leave the style in the common, where the next musician can still drink.
Sources: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V (Project Gutenberg). Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025). Related here: a plain guide to AI music credits and AI music labels.