ACÉPHALE · No. ii
The Deed
Who owns an AI-written manuscript. The short answer is you. The long answer is more interesting, and you should read it before you pay anyone in this industry.
When ACEPHALE delivers your manuscript, it is yours outright. We retain no rights, no license-back, no credit requirement, no royalty, no claim of any kind. You may revise it, publish it under any name including your own or none, sell it, serialize it, or burn it. We keep a copy only long enough to deliver it. This is the contract position, it is unconditional, and it is the easy half of the answer.
The harder half is copyright, and most services selling AI writing simply do not bring it up. We will. Under current United States guidance (the Copyright Office's Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability report of January 2025), copyright requires human authorship. Material generated entirely by an AI is not copyrightable, and providing prompts alone, however detailed, is not considered enough human control to make the prompter the author.
The same report is equally clear about the other direction: a human's creative selection, arrangement, or modification of AI output is protectable, and including AI-generated material inside a larger human work does not poison the human contribution. In plain terms: the raw render we deliver is, on its own, likely public domain the moment it exists; and the moment you revise it, cut it, rearrange it, and rewrite it in your own hand, the resulting manuscript carries your copyright in everything you contributed.
This is why we sell a first pass and say so plainly. The render is the raw material; your revision is not just an artistic necessity but the act the law recognizes as authorship. A service that tells you an untouched AI draft is fully yours in the copyright sense is selling you a comfort the U.S. Copyright Office has explicitly declined to provide.
This page describes U.S. guidance as of early 2025 and is not legal advice; other jurisdictions differ, and the technology-specific parts of the guidance may evolve. For decisions that matter, ask a lawyer, not a sales page.
- —The delivered manuscript is yours outright: no retained rights, no license-back, no royalties, ever.
- —Publish under any name. We never disclose commissions or clients.
- —Your revised manuscript carries your copyright in everything you contributed, and revision is the point of a first pass.
- —We are honest that the untouched render itself likely carries no copyright, because that is the current state of U.S. law, not a flaw in the deal.
How the render is produced, and why it arrives ready for exactly this kind of revision, is described in The Method. Everything else is in Questions.
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