You might not own the website you just made

You described what you wanted and something made you a logo. It is on the van now. The sign. The business cards. The website.

Here is the question nobody asked at any point in that process: is it yours?

Not “do you have the file.” You have the file. Does anyone have to stop using it if they copy it?

The answer is now settled, and it is not the one people assume

In March the US Supreme Court declined to hear a case about whether a machine can be an author. That left standing an appeal court ruling that said it plainly: authors must be human beings.

The reasoning is less abstract than it sounds. Copyright assumes an owner who can hold property. Its term is measured against a lifespan. Joint authorship requires intent. Registration requires a signature. Those are all things only a person can do.

The consequence for you: material generated without a human author carries no copyright. Not weak copyright. None. If a competitor three streets away takes a liking to your logo and starts using it, copyright gives you nothing to point at.

Britain is unusual here, and it is about to stop being

This part is genuinely under-reported.

The UK has had, since the 1980s, an odd little provision protecting “computer-generated works” where there is no human author at all — fifty years of protection, written for an era of early computers rather than for something that produces a finished logo from one sentence.

In 2026 the government’s own report on copyright and AI concluded it should probably go, keeping protection only where a human made real creative choices. Most respondents agreed that work made solely by a machine should not be protected, and the report noted there was little evidence anyone was relying on the provision anyway.

So the two regimes are converging on the same rule, from opposite directions: the human choices are the thing that creates ownership.

Nothing about this has been explained to the people buying a £29 logo on a Tuesday afternoon.

Three questions, and everybody blurs them into one

This is the most useful thing in this article, so it gets its own section.

When you put a name or a mark on your business, there are three separate questions, and passing one tells you nothing whatsoever about the other two.

1. Authorship — did a human make the creative choices? This decides whether copyright exists at all. One prompt and accept the first result: almost certainly not. Direct it, reject things, revise, choose between options, change it yourself: now there is an argument, and both the US guidance and the UK proposal point at the same evidence — selection, arrangement, modification, and a record of the choices.

2. Ownership — does the tool’s licence actually give you exclusive rights? Separate question entirely. Some generators grant you a licence to use the output while reserving the right to produce something near-identical for the next person who asks. “You may use this” is not the same sentence as “only you may use this.”

3. Clearance — is it too close to something somebody already uses? And this is the one that actually costs money.

Clearance is the risk that bites

A generator produces what it produces because of what it has seen. Ask for a logo for a bakery and you get something shaped like the bakery logos that already exist. Most of the time that is merely generic. Occasionally it is close enough to a real mark that the owner’s solicitor writes to you.

Then you are not in an interesting debate about authorship. You are reprinting signage, repainting a van, changing a sign above a door, and explaining to customers why the name changed.

Note the asymmetry, because it is brutal: you may have no copyright in your own logo, and still be infringing someone else’s rights with it. Those two facts sit together perfectly comfortably.

The reassuring half

It would be easy to read the above and panic. Do not. Three things are genuinely fine.

Trademark still works, and it is the protection that actually matters here. Trademark asks whether a mark is distinctive and whether you use it in commerce — not who drew it. A logo can be ineligible for copyright and registrable as a trademark at the same time. For a small business, that is the protection worth having anyway.

Your facts were never copyrightable by anyone. Your opening hours, your prices, your address, the fact that you do electric bikes — nobody owns those, nobody ever did, and nothing has changed. Most of your website is facts.

Your photographs are unambiguously yours. You stood there and took them. That is the one asset in this whole conversation with no legal question hanging over it, which is one more reason to send your own pictures rather than use a stock image of somebody else’s shop.

(General information, not legal advice. The detail differs by country and this is actively moving. If something here applies to you, ask someone qualified.)

The fair question

devkoi builds websites with AI, so it would be evasive not to say where that leaves you.

The honest position: a page generated from one sentence, accepted without a second thought, is exactly the kind of material the rulings above are about. That is true of anything generated, including here.

What is different in practice is the shape of the work. You describe it, look at it, say the header is too big, say the red is wrong, reject a version, ask for the hours moved. That is selection, rejection and revision — the human creative choice both regimes say they are looking for. And every version is kept, so the sequence of your decisions still exists rather than being something you have to reconstruct later from memory.

That is not a guarantee of anything. Whether a particular page clears the bar is assessed case by case, and nobody here can promise you an outcome.

And the limit, stated plainly: devkoi does not do trademark clearance. Nobody in this process is checking that your business name or your logo is not already somebody else’s. That is the risk that actually empties a bank account, and it sits with you.

What to do this week

1. Search the trademark register before you commit to a name or a mark. Both the UK and US registers are free to search and open to the public. Ten minutes, before the signage, not after.

2. If the name matters commercially, register it. That is the protection that works regardless of how the logo was made. It is the single highest-value thing in this list.

3. Keep the record of your own involvement. The conversation, the versions, the things you rejected. If authorship is ever questioned, that record is the evidence — and it is worth far more than trying to remember in two years what you asked for.

4. Read what the tool’s terms say about exclusivity. Look for whether anyone else can be given the same output. It is usually one paragraph and it is usually not the one being advertised.

5. Use your own photographs. The only thing on your site with no ownership question attached.

“Here are the photos from my phone — use these instead of the stock ones.”

6. Stop worrying about your facts. Hours, prices, address, services. Nobody can own those. Put them on the page plainly and spend your anxiety on the logo instead.

7. Do the clearance check before you print five hundred of anything. Reprinting is the expensive part. It always is.

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There is a tidy irony in all this. For two years the pitch has been that you no longer need to make the creative decisions yourself.

The law has arrived at the opposite conclusion: the decisions are the only part that produces anything you can own. The machine can do the drawing. Somebody still has to do the choosing, and it had better be you.