Speaking with TechRadar Pro in an exclusive interview at Adobe Summit 2026, the company's Chief Legal Officer, Louise Pentland, urged policymakers to resist radical changes, and for courts and companies instead to focus on a more pragmatic approach.
At the same time, Pentland also advocated for tech companies to get involved – not to redefine copyright law, but to maintain authenticity and protect creators in this era of AI assistance.
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Copyright rules must evolve – but we don't need to rewrite them from the ground up
Our discussion with Pentland comes at a critical moment in AI copyright law. We're shifting from refusal of copyright protection for AI-generated assets, to the consideration of protection for content that combines AI with just the right amount of human interjection. But what's considered 'enough' is still up for debate.
In 2025, the US Copyright Office granted protection to an image that was created with AI assistance, making this the first time anyone has ever been granted copyright protection for AI-generated work.
Pentland was particularly proud of this case, with Kent Keirsey, the artist of 'A Single Piece of American Cheese', now working at Adobe – we suspect this worker is now contributing to copyright conversations within the company, too.
However, the decision was ultimately made by a single human, or group of humans, and it may not have been reflected equally across the world due to the case-by-case nature of copyright protection.
Ultimately, changes need to be made to standardize thresholds for global consistency, but rather than rewriting copyright law entirely, Pentland believes existing frameworks can stretch to accommodate AI – just with clearer guidance.
"The worst thing you could do is rip everything up and start again," Pentland told us, pointing to ongoing court activity where judges are already applying traditional law.
At the heart of Adobe's arguments and the company's general position on AI is that human creativity is irreplaceable. That applies not just to copyright, but also to model training.
"If you disincentivize creators to create content or create images, then what are you going to have?" Pentland asked, warning that failing to protect artists could risk undermining the entire data foundations that generative AI relies upon to exist in the first place.
Her team is advocating for stronger protections for all creators – including those who have given permission for their work to feed training datasets – with the goal of maintaining human creativity.
Policy isn't everything – software developers also have a responsibility
However, rather than placing the burden entirely on regulation, Pentland believes the technology itself must play a central role in governance.
For Adobe, this means pushing Content Credentials, which the company describes separately as "a durable, industry-standard metadata type that acts like a digital nutrition label for content," in a bid to create verifiable content trails.
Adobe sees this type of verification protecting consumers against threats like deepfakes, enabling users to verify authenticity.
To date, the 'Big Five' camera makers (Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon and Leica) and some Android manufacturers (Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy) have implemented Content Credentials, as have a number of popular platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Meta and TikTok.
When asked about watermarking, Pentland rejected visible marks as the default solution, favoring options like metadata or QR-style verification to preserve the integrity of an artist's work.
The future of AI copyright and protection isn't uniform, nor is it just on regulators
It's been years since popular generative AI tools gained public traction (we're looking at you, ChatGPT), but courts are still battling to define what copyright looks like in the era of AI.
But with regulators drafting new takes on existing rules, and software vendors trying to inject an element of governance into their own technologies, it's clear that a single, unified solution isn't winning.
The difficulty at the moment is that regions like the US, EU and UK are pushing their own goals. "It's a fallacy to think there would be a universal standard that would apply globally," Pentland said. "but we can dream."
Instead, it looks like we'll be seeing a layered approach that combines existing copyright laws with slight modifications and clarifications, technologies that can verify content authenticity, and better creator protection.
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