Who owns a song made with AI?
Who owns a song made with AI?
Plain English. A little legal context where it matters. This is not legal advice — for professional guidance, consult a copyright attorney in your jurisdiction.
Short answer: you do
When you use BananaRat Studio, the songs you make are yours. You own the lyrics you shaped, the structure you directed, the melody you guided, and the final mix you approved. BananaRat Studio holds only a platform license — the narrow right to store your files, serve them to you on request, and display them in your account. We have no right to sell your music, license it to third parties, or use it to train AI models. That license terminates if you delete your account.
Anthropic, who provides the underlying language model API, operates a zero-retention policy on API inputs. Your song content does not persist in their systems after your request completes.
What the law says about AI-assisted authorship
Copyright law in the United States, EU, UK, and Canada requires a human author. The US Copyright Office's March 2023 guidance confirmed that purely machine-generated output is not copyrightable on its own, but that human creative expression woven into an AI-assisted work is protectable. The threshold question is whether a human made meaningful creative choices — and songwriters who use BananaRat Studio typically do.
Every decision you make during composition counts: the genre and mood you specified, the lyrical theme you developed, the structure you chose, the sections you regenerated until they felt right, the key you transposed to match your vocal range. Those choices are yours. The Witness Log captures them timestamped so you can demonstrate authorship if it's ever questioned.
What BananaRat Studio will never do
- Claim co-authorship or platform credit on your songs
- License your songs to third parties without your permission
- Train AI models on your compositions (API zero-retention; no exceptions)
- Use your songs in marketing without your explicit written consent
What strengthens your ownership claim
The more human input goes in, the stronger your authorship position. Importing your own lyrics, refining chord progressions across multiple sessions, using the section-regenerate tool to iterate toward a specific artistic result — all of these are documented in the Witness Log and reflected in the Authorship Evidence score on your song's Evidence Bundle.
For songs you intend to release commercially, review your Authorship Evidence score and consider registering with the US Copyright Office or your country's equivalent. The Evidence Bundle exports a PDF narrative you can reference in a registration filing.
No platform license to your songs means no lock-in
You can export your songs in every format we produce — lyrics, chords, MIDI, MusicXML, stems, mastered MP3, AAF — and take them anywhere. We do not watermark files to prevent use outside our platform. AuthorMark embeds cryptographic authorship credentials, not a lock.