A USCO opinion, and then two more confirmations of that opinion, one before Congress, is not settled? Unless the law changes the only thing licensable is the prompts.

There was a thing, but it didn't happen often, where a GPL advocate would take an MIT or BSD license project, make some additions, license their changes under the GPL, and effectively copyleft their release of the combined work.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think the law is simple.

Code exists in the Linux kernel that is licensed under permissive licenses. This works because (some) permissive licenses contain no restrictions incompatible with releasing the code and/or derivative works under the GPL.

This is why the original BSD license (with advertising clause) was incompatible with the GPL, while BSD without the advertising clause is not.

"Public domain" is not a license, and has different meanings in different jurisdictions, and thus it can be useful to release code under a license even if the intent is unrestricted use.

The opinion was only for fully ai-generated content, notably the human-authored components of the comic were still protected. Whats unsettled is when the artifact is built up over multiple rounds of targeted edits to existing output in collaboration with a human, and whether that output is protected.

I'm guessing there's too much money in that being protected for it not to be protected so, no I think providing LICENSE is still worthwhile.

USCO doesn't make the law nor do they decide what the law says, they just register Copyrights. However, registration is not necessary for a work to be protected under Copyright law.

Congress makes the law then the Court interprets it, which hasn't happened yet.

If choosing the position / angle of a camera and its settings is enough to gain Copyright over the images it generates then prompting a model to generate an image is enough too. I don't see how anyone can come to any other conclusion.

The creativity bar for Copyright is not high. An alphabetically ordered list of customers does not meet it. Pointing a camera at someone and pushing the button does.

Congress has made the laws and USCO interprets them and makes rules based on its interpretation. Those are the implementation of those laws.

Directing is not copyrightable. The person who takes the picture owns the copyright (fixation rule) unless some other contract says otherwise. Saying the prompt writer is a director reduces their claim to ownership.