Nearly all legal experts saw this coming. Mexico's Supreme Court has ruled that works created solely by artificial intelligence cannot receive copyright protection. Period. End of story. The Second Chamber's draft ruling, circulated in July 2025, made it crystal clear: no humans, no copyright.
Mexico's ruling is definitive: AI-generated works are nobody's intellectual property. Just plain public domain from birth.
The case began with someone trying to register a "Virtual Avatar" made by Leonardo AI. They wanted full moral and patrimonial rights. Fat chance. Neither INDAUTOR (Mexico's Copyright Office) nor the Federal Administrative Court was having any of it.
Why? Because copyright is a human right, stupid. The Court emphasized that authorship requires human creativity, intellect, and experiences—things AI simply doesn't have. Machines don't feel. They don't create. They generate output based on programming. Current AI systems function as sophisticated pattern matchers rather than true creative entities.
The ruling cited Mexico's Federal Copyright Law as the backbone of its decision. AI-generated works lack originality and creativity attributes needed for authorship. So they're public domain from day one. Tough break for tech companies hoping to monopolize AI art.
What about human-AI collaborations? That's different. The Court isn't completely stuck in the Stone Era. People working with AI can still claim copyright—if they document their creative input. Good luck proving how much you actually contributed, though. The draft ruling specifically originates from a dispute involving a digitally generated image by Gerald García Báez.
Meanwhile, Mexican lawmakers haven't been sitting around. A bill introduced last year aims to amend copyright law for AI audiovisual material. Several other draft laws propose ethical regulations for AI and robotics. INDAUTOR might even become the AI regulator. But don't hold your breath—nothing's been enacted yet.
The constitutional basis for the decision seems rock-solid. Articles 12 and 18 of the LFDA support excluding AI as authors. The Court rejected any notion that machines deserve legal personality or moral rights. The Supreme Court definitively clarified that international treaties do not require copyright protections for non-human creations.
In the end, it's simple: in Mexico, humans create art. Algorithms just process data. And courts aren't ready to blur that line. Not today, anyway.