A technology company deploying a generative AI platform across CIS markets discovers that its most commercially valuable outputs – marketing copy, software code, design assets – may not be legally protected in Georgia. The country's intellectual property legislation was drafted before AI-generated content existed as a practical phenomenon. The question of who owns what an AI produces is, for Georgian law, still open.
Georgian intellectual property legislation attributes authorship exclusively to natural persons, leaving AI-generated works without a clear statutory owner. Rights over such outputs are allocated indirectly through technology licensing agreements, employment contracts, and commissioning arrangements. Businesses operating in Georgia should audit these documents now, before a dispute or enforcement gap exposes unprotected assets.
This analysis examines the doctrinal background, the gap between statute and practice, competing interpretations, cross-border implications for CIS clients, and the strategic steps available to international businesses operating in or through Georgia.
Doctrinal foundations: what Georgian intellectual property law actually says
Georgia's intellectual property legislative regime sits within a civil law tradition, heavily influenced by the country's Association Agreement with the European Union. The core body of copyright and related rights legislation reserves the status of author for human creators. Originality – the threshold condition for protection – is assessed by reference to the personal, creative contribution of an individual.
This human-authorship requirement is not a peculiarity of Georgian law. It reflects the consensus position across most civil law systems. The consequence for AI-generated works is significant. Where no identifiable human author made a sufficiently creative contribution, the output may fall outside the protection of copyright legislation entirely.
Georgian intellectual property legislation does, however, protect programmnoe obespechenie (software) as a category of literary works. This creates one avenue for businesses. The AI system itself – its underlying code, training architecture, and interface – can attract protection as software. But that protection covers the tool, not the content the tool produces.
A second avenue is available under provisions governing works created in the course of employment. Where an employee uses an AI system as part of their job. Additionally, the human contribution to the final output meets the originality threshold. Georgian employment and copyright legislation may allocate the resulting rights to the employer. The practical difficulty lies in assessing what degree of human direction – selecting prompts, curating outputs, editing results – constitutes a protectable creative act. Georgian courts have not yet produced definitive guidance on this threshold.
A third avenue involves commissioning. Where a business commissions a third party to produce content using AI tools, the contractual terms govern ownership of outputs, subject to mandatory provisions in intellectual property legislation. Practitioners in Georgia note that many commissioning agreements predate the widespread use of generative AI and do not address output ownership explicitly. This creates disputes about whether standard assignment clauses transfer rights that may not exist.
A fourth and frequently overlooked consideration concerns database rights. Georgian legislation, aligned with EU principles through the Association Agreement process, recognises protection for databases in which substantial investment has been made in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the contents. A curated dataset used to train an AI model, or an AI-generated dataset itself, may attract this form of protection – independently of whether individual outputs qualify for copyright.
The gap between statute and practice: where disputes currently arise
The most acute practical problem is the absence of a clear default ownership rule for AI-generated outputs. Civil law systems generally dislike legal vacuums. Georgian courts facing these questions must apply general principles of intellectual property legislation by analogy. The outcome of that analogical reasoning is not predictable from the statute alone.
Several distinct dispute patterns are already visible in the Georgian market. The first involves technology licensing. A business licences an AI tool from a foreign developer. The licence agreement is governed by a third-country law. The outputs are used commercially in Georgia. When a competitor copies those outputs, the Georgian rights holder must prove ownership before Georgian courts. If the licence agreement does not expressly assign output rights, and if the human creative contribution is minimal, that proof may be difficult to establish.
The second pattern involves employment. An employee uses an employer-provided AI system to generate content. The employer assumes it owns the output because it provided the tool and paid the employee's salary. Georgian employment legislation and intellectual property legislation, read together, may support that assumption – but only if the employment contract clearly defines the scope of duties to include AI-assisted creation. Contracts silent on this point leave the position uncertain.
The third pattern involves software liability. A business deploys an AI system that produces outputs causing harm – incorrect legal advice, defective medical information, misleading commercial content. Georgian civil legislation on delictual liability requires fault. Algorithmic accountability – the question of who bears responsibility when an autonomous system causes damage – is not addressed directly by Georgian legislation. Courts must resolve this by reference to general tort principles, with unpredictable results for the software developer, the operator, and the end user.
The fourth pattern involves digital services. Platforms that host AI-generated content face questions about intermediary liability. Georgian digital services legislation has not yet been updated to address AI-generated content specifically. The rules applicable to hosting and transmitting user-generated content are applied by analogy, but the analogy is imperfect when the content is produced autonomously rather than submitted by a human user.
Each of these patterns shares a common structural feature: the law provides a general rule designed for human creativity, and practice demands an answer the rule was not designed to give. Until Georgian courts or the legislature address this gap directly, businesses must manage the uncertainty through contract.
To explore how Georgia's intellectual property regime applies to your specific AI deployment, contact us at info@ferrazwhitmore.com.
Competing interpretations and the trajectory of Georgian courts
Georgian courts have not yet produced a settled body of doctrine on AI-generated works. The limited published decisions addressing digital content focus on traditional copyright infringement – copying of software code, unauthorised reproduction of databases, breach of software licence terms. The specific question of authorship and ownership of generative AI outputs remains, for now, largely untested at the appellate level.
Two interpretive approaches are visible in academic commentary and early practitioner submissions. The first applies a strict human-authorship rule. Under this approach, outputs produced autonomously by an AI system attract no copyright protection. The practical consequence is that the output enters the public domain immediately upon creation. Any person – including a direct competitor – may freely copy, adapt, and commercialise it. This approach provides legal certainty at the cost of commercial incentive.
The second approach applies a purposive interpretation of the originality requirement. Under this view, where a human exercised sufficient creative control over the process – designing the prompt, selecting training data, curating and editing outputs – that human contribution satisfies the threshold. The AI is treated as a sophisticated tool, analogous to a camera or a computer-aided design system. The human behind the tool is the author. This approach preserves commercial incentive but creates difficult line-drawing problems: how much human involvement is enough?
Practitioners in Georgia observe that the second approach is more consistent with the EU-influenced direction of Georgian intellectual property policy. Georgia's Association Agreement creates a sustained push toward EU-compatible standards. The EU's own position on AI-generated works. which leans toward requiring human creative contribution but has not resolved all questions definitively. is therefore a useful reference point for predicting how Georgian courts and regulators are likely to reason.
A third interpretive thread concerns Sakartvelos saavtoro da momijnavebuli uflebata kanoni (the Law of Georgia on Copyright and Related Rights). Some practitioners argue that the commissioning provisions of that legislation, read broadly, can allocate rights to the commissioning party even where the creative process was wholly automated. This reading is contested. It stretches the text of the legislation beyond what its drafters contemplated. But it has practical appeal for businesses that need a clear ownership position.
The most commercially dangerous interpretation is the first: strict human authorship with no residual protection. A business that has built its product on AI-generated content and assumed ownership may discover, when enforcing against a copyist, that it holds no rights to enforce. Addressing this risk proactively – through contractual layering and human creative contribution – is essential for any business deploying AI commercially in Georgia.
For a comparative view of how this question is addressed in the broader CIS region. The analysis of AI-generated works and intellectual property in Russia provides a useful parallel perspective on doctrinal approaches across civil law systems.
Cross-border implications for CIS clients and international businesses
Georgia occupies a distinctive position in the CIS commercial environment. It is the most EU-integrated economy in the region, a hub for technology companies relocating from Russia and other CIS jurisdictions, and a jurisdiction with a relatively open regulatory posture toward digital business. These features make the IP gap on AI-generated works particularly consequential for cross-border operators.
A technology company that relocated to Georgia from Russia, Kazakhstan, or Belarus brings with it IP assets – including AI-generated content – whose ownership was allocated under a different legal system. Georgian intellectual property legislation does not automatically recognise foreign ownership determinations. A Georgian court evaluating an infringement claim will apply Georgian law to the question of whether the claimant holds an enforceable right. If the foreign law allocated ownership through a mechanism that has no equivalent in Georgian law – for example, a statutory employer-authorship rule with different conditions – the Georgian court may reach a different conclusion.
This is not merely theoretical. Companies that relocated their operational structures to Georgia during 2022–2024 often did so rapidly, prioritising continuity of business over rigorous IP migration planning. The consequence is that a significant share of these businesses holds AI-related IP assets under contracts and registration records that do not clearly establish Georgian-law ownership. When a competitor begins copying their outputs in the Georgian or EU market, they discover the gap.
The EU dimension adds a further layer of complexity. Georgian businesses exporting digital services or AI-generated content into the EU market must engage with EU intellectual property legislation and, increasingly, with AI Act compliance requirements. The EU's regulatory approach to AI. including provisions on transparency, algorithmic accountability, and high-risk AI system deployment – sets standards that Georgian operators serving EU clients must meet, regardless of what Georgian domestic law requires.
Technology licensing structures compound the difficulty. A Georgian business that licences AI software from a US or EU developer typically receives a licence to use the tool, not an assignment of output rights. The licence agreement is usually governed by US or EU law. When outputs are deployed commercially in Georgia, the Georgian rights position must be established separately. Many licence agreements are silent on this point, or contain boilerplate language that does not clearly address Georgian-law ownership.
For businesses operating between Georgia and EU member states, the interaction between Georgian copyright principles and EU data protection and AI legislation also raises questions about training data. If an AI model was trained on data scraped from Georgian or EU sources without adequate consent, the outputs may be tainted by upstream IP or data protection violations. Georgian courts have not yet addressed the downstream consequences of such upstream defects. EU supervisory authorities have begun to do so, and their findings could affect the commercial usability of AI outputs in both markets.
For a tailored strategy on AI asset protection and technology licensing in Georgia, reach out to info@ferrazwhitmore.com.
Strategic recommendations and the outlook for Georgian AI regulation
The doctrinal uncertainty described above is manageable. It requires deliberate contractual and structural responses, not regulatory permission. The following approach reflects current best practice for international businesses deploying AI commercially in Georgia.
The first priority is contractual layering. Every agreement in the AI value chain – development contracts, employment agreements, commissioning arrangements, and technology licensing agreements – should contain explicit provisions addressing output ownership under Georgian law. General IP assignment clauses written for traditional creative works are insufficient. The assignment must cover outputs generated with AI assistance, specify the conditions under which human creative contribution is deemed sufficient, and address the allocation of rights where contribution is minimal or disputed.
The second priority is human contribution documentation. Businesses should implement workflows that record the human creative decisions made in the AI content production process. Prompt design, selection among competing outputs, editorial revision, and quality control decisions all constitute evidence of human contribution. Retaining this evidence – in version control systems, project management records, or documented review processes – supports the purposive originality argument if rights are later challenged.
The third priority is database rights registration. Where AI systems are used to generate or curate substantial datasets, businesses should consider whether those datasets qualify for protection under Georgian database legislation. Registration with the Sakpatenti (National Intellectual Property Center of Georgia) is not mandatory for copyright protection, which arises automatically, but a formal registration record strengthens the evidentiary position in enforcement proceedings.
The fourth priority is cross-border IP audit. Businesses that have migrated from other CIS jurisdictions or that operate simultaneously in multiple markets should commission a review of their AI-related IP assets from a Georgian law perspective. The audit should identify gaps between foreign-law ownership positions and Georgian-law requirements, and recommend corrective documentation steps.
The fifth priority is monitoring the regulatory trajectory. Georgia's legislative programme in the technology sector is active. The government has signalled intent to align with EU digital legislation as part of the Association Agreement implementation process. This includes potential alignment with aspects of EU AI Act compliance standards and with updated copyright principles addressing digital and AI-generated content. Businesses should track draft legislation and participate in consultation processes where available.
The outlook is one of gradual convergence with EU standards, but the timeline is uncertain. In the near term – the next two to three years – Georgian law will remain largely as it stands: a body of intellectual property legislation designed for human creators. Applied by courts reasoning by analogy to AI-generated outputs. The businesses that position themselves advantageously during this period are those that do not wait for legislative clarity before securing their IP assets through contract and documentation.
Competitors who fail to take these steps now risk discovering that their AI-generated content is unprotected – and freely copyable – at the moment it becomes commercially valuable. That is the practical cost of treating this as a future problem.
The broader opportunity is also real. Georgia's technology sector is growing rapidly. A business that establishes clear. Defensible IP positions in AI-generated content now. before the market matures and before competitors build competing positions. will hold a structural advantage when Georgian courts and legislators eventually provide the clarity the market needs.
Engaging a lawyer in Georgia with cross-border AI and IP experience is the most direct way to convert this analysis into a concrete protection strategy. As an international law firm operating across CIS and EU jurisdictions, Ferraz &. Whitmore advises clients on the full spectrum of AI-related IP questions. From software liability assessment to intellectual property protection in Georgia for technology businesses.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Can an AI system be registered as an author of a work under Georgian intellectual property law?
A: No. Georgian intellectual property legislation reserves authorship for natural persons. An AI system cannot hold rights or be named as an author. The rights over an AI-generated output are attributed to the human developer, operator, or commissioning party, depending on the contractual and factual circumstances of creation.
Q: How long does it take to register a copyright or software-related right in Georgia, and what costs are involved?
A: Copyright in Georgia arises automatically upon creation without registration. Optional registration through the National Intellectual Property Center of Georgia (Sakpatenti) typically takes several weeks for straightforward filings. Government fees are modest, though legal preparation costs vary with the complexity of the subject matter.
Q: Is it a misconception that AI-generated outputs automatically belong to whoever owns the AI software?
A: Yes. Software ownership and ownership of AI-generated outputs are legally distinct questions under Georgian law. Owning a licence to use an AI tool does not automatically transfer ownership of its outputs. The applicable technology licensing agreement, employment contract, or commissioning arrangement governs who holds rights over specific outputs. Clients should review these documents carefully before assuming ownership.
About Ferraz & Whitmore
Ferraz & Whitmore is an international law firm based in Lisbon, advising business clients across 46 jurisdictions. Our team combines Portuguese civil law expertise with English common law tradition to deliver cross-border legal solutions in AI and technology law, intellectual property protection, and digital services regulation. We work with technology companies, international investors, and in-house legal teams deploying AI systems across CIS, EU, and high-growth markets. The firm's AI and technology practice covers AI Act compliance, algorithmic accountability, software liability, and technology licensing across both civil law and common law systems. Our attorneys have advised on AI-related transactions and IP structuring matters in jurisdictions ranging from Georgia and Russia to EU member states and the UAE. As an international law firm in Georgia and across the CIS region, Ferraz & Whitmore offers direct access to practitioners who understand the gap between statute and practice in emerging technology law. For guidance on AI-generated works, IP protection, or technology licensing in Georgia, contact us at AI and technology law services in Georgia or reach out directly at info@ferrazwhitmore.com.
Disclaimer: This publication is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The information herein should not be relied upon as a substitute for professional legal counsel tailored to your specific circumstances. Ferraz & Whitmore assumes no liability for actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this material. For advice regarding your particular situation, please contact info@ferrazwhitmore.com.