Parcial. La ley vigente exige autor persona física: un output verdaderamente autónomo no tiene ruta autoral establecida, mientras la expresión humana original y separable puede protegerse. Existe VDRS voluntario y probatorio, pero no se verificó acto individual GenAI. Un caso general de infracción fue reportado en 2022 y no debe confundirse con precedente de autoría o IA.
Investigación abierta. Corte general del Atlas: 31 de agosto de 2026. Cobertura no significa revisión completa ni vigencia certificada.
Marco y alcance
Autonomous output: section 4(ii) requires a physical person who created the work. Because the Act has no deemed-author rule for computer-generated works, a final expressive feature determined only by a model lacks the statutory author needed for ordinary authorial copyright, even if someone owns the account, paid for generation or selected the result. Assisted work: analyze the final artifact feature by feature. Protectable human text, drawing, photography, music, code, composition, selection, coordination, arrangement or revision must be original, perceptible in the final work and linked to evidence of the human's creative decisions. Human contribution does not automatically absorb model-determined expression. Prompting is evidence, not a legal shortcut. A prompt may itself contain protectable human expression or help prove selection/arrangement, but functional instructions, ideas, methods, concepts and mere data are excluded under section 7. The fact-intensive question is what human expression survived in the claimed work. Ownership is downstream from subsistence. Collective-work, employment, assignment and audiovisual-producer provisions can vest or transfer rights that exist; they do not turn a legal entity, employer, commissioner or producer into the physical-person creator of an otherwise autonomous output. Database and compilation protection is narrow. Section 6 can protect original human selection, coordination or arrangement, without conferring rights in unprotected data or every generated item. A dataset, prompt library and generated corpus must be separated. Producer and neighboring rights are separate. A sound-recording producer, audiovisual producer, performer or broadcaster may have rights in the fixation, performance or broadcast under sections 19(5) and 23-27, but that does not establish authorial copyright in AI-generated lyrics, melody, image, voice, narration or code beneath it. A performer claim needs an actual human performance. A synthetic voice or avatar does not become a human performance merely because a person commissioned or marketed it; proof of any human recorded performance and permissions must be separately preserved. VDRS is evidentiary, not constitutive. A certificate can be prima facie evidence of deposited authorship/ownership assertions, but the Department's disclaimer against validity opinions prevents treating registration alone as a merits ruling that autonomous AI expression is protected. The VDRS is not a zero-review mailbox: paragraph 14 directs a limited formality check including whether the filing presents copyrightable subject matter. That gate remains materially narrower than an originality/authorship adjudication because paragraph 5 disclaims comparison and validity opinions, and disputes go to court. The public notice corpus cannot establish grants. Notices invite opposition before registration, CR1 lacks an AI field, and the public corpus contains no final individualized certificate/refusal reasoning. Aggregate registration counts are categorically insufficient. The seventeen notices that name an organization as author conflict facially with section 4(ii) and CR1 instructions requiring the person who actually created the work. Because they are applicant notices rather than final reasoned outcomes, the anomaly shows why the public register cannot be treated as adjudicated human authorship; it does not prove the Department granted protection to a legal-entity author. National enforcement is not zero. The 2022 Samuh report and 2023 five-case aggregate establish some court activity, but without primary judgments they do not reveal authorship/originality doctrine. The negotiated figures reported in Samuh are remedies/results, not a reconstructable holding or ratio. The 2024 GenAI civil-service guideline is a compliance source. Its warnings about plagiarism, source citation and infringement do not create copyright in outputs, deem civil servants authors, or adjudicate ownership. Reform is not current law. Proposed amendments and planned Cabinet submission cannot alter the section 4(ii) physical-person definition before promulgation; the classification must be refreshed if an amendment is enacted. Evidence gate: retain human drafts, sketches, source/layer/track files, version history, commits, prompts, system instructions, model/version, parameters, seeds, retrieval/fine-tuning inputs, intermediate outputs, selection/rejection log, post-edit record, contributor identities, contracts, licences and dates. Map each claimed final feature to a human decision and source file. Defenses remain atomic: no physical-person creator; no original human expression; idea/method/mere-data exclusion; non-original selection/arrangement; copied third-party expression; invalid chain of title; only a producer/fixation right; performer is synthetic; territorial/treaty issue; and reliance on a VDRS record that is merely prima facie.
Limitaciones documentadas
The public EDMS/register is not exposed as a searchable item-level database, so older, private or non-indexed AI-related applications and certificates cannot be excluded. CR1 has no AI-use disclosure field, so silence in application notices cannot establish that a work did not involve AI. No published national GenAI copyright merits judgment, VDRS refusal, opposition outcome, cancellation or appeal was located; however BBS reports one resolved general infringement matter and an aggregate of five registered matters since 2020. Their court files remain unlocated. The Samuh judgment docket, signed text, judge, defendant names, pleadings, reasoning, exact legal basis, appeal status and enforcement record were not recovered; the four other matters in BBS's aggregate remain unidentified. No official Bhutan guidance defines the minimum human expressive contribution for GenAI-assisted works or how to separate it from model-determined material. The proposed amendments had not been verified as enacted at cutoff; a later promulgation could change authorship, registration or enforcement analysis. Dzongkha search coverage is constrained by terminology, OCR, transliteration and web indexing, so the language-specific zero is bounded rather than absolute.