What legal developments affect content ownership and engine access?

Can an agency guarantee exclusive copyright in generated content?

Do not accept a blanket guarantee without examining human authorship. The US Copyright Office’s 29 January 2025 report explains that sufficient human expressive contribution can support protection, while merely supplying prompts does not establish authorship of the generated output. AI assistance does not, by itself, disqualify a larger human-authored work. This is an ongoing legal baseline, not a new 2026 statute. (copyright.gov)

Recommended contract terms should distinguish original human work, AI-generated components, licensed material and third-party excerpts. Ask for the records needed to support the rights being assigned.

The Copyright Office’s AI page still identifies its training report as a pre-publication version. Do not describe that report as a court ruling or use it as a blanket licence to copy competitors’ content. (copyright.gov)

Do the Google antitrust remedies create guaranteed AI visibility?

They are not a sound basis for a supplier’s inclusion guarantee. The DOJ’s official case record includes a final judgment dated 5 December 2025 and an implementation status report dated 17 September 2026. The judgment addresses, among other matters, licensed data access for qualified competitors. (justice.gov)

Our buyer-side inference is that changes to distribution or upstream access should be tracked as possible measurement confounders—not attributed automatically to an agency’s work. Maintain a change log and require a fresh baseline when the observed service or collection method materially changes.