In an era when AI generates everything, the last human copyright agent receives a strange case: someone wants to register copyright for a song no one has ever heard.
Xie Ming had been in the business for fourteen years — music, literature, visual arts, and now mostly algorithmic copyright disputes.
After 2031, when generative AI output began to be measured in millions of works per second, "original" became a philosophical question rather than a legal one. Most copyright agents quit. Law firms replaced junior lawyers with AI document reviewers. The Copyright Bureau cut staff by 60%.
Xie Ming stayed.
He had a stubborn belief: within all these generated works, there were still things with real people standing behind them — and those things needed someone to explain what they were.
The case arrived Wednesday afternoon.
A representative, refusing to name his client, placed a memory stick on Xie Ming's desk. Inside: a 3-minute-27-second piano composition that had never been released, never been heard by anyone.
"I need proof of human creation," Xie Ming said. "Drafts, revision history, timestamps. Anything that shows it wasn't AI-generated."
"There are none. It was composed with pen and paper. Hand-written score, manually recorded."
In 2034, this was nearly impossible to verify.
Over three days, Xie Ming ran every check available:
Acoustic analysis traced the recording to a Roland UP-180 — a model discontinued in 2019. Comparison against AI music generation databases found no match above 73% similarity (the standard detection threshold was 85%). Two music professors said the unusual harmonic choices didn't match typical AI training outputs — it sounded like someone from a specific musical background.
Then, buried in the Copyright Bureau database: 12.3% melodic similarity to a short piece from 2019, by a composer who died in 2022.
When he messaged the representative, the reply came slowly:
"My client says that was his father's."
There was no legal resolution. Xie Ming filed an application with acoustic reports, similarity analysis, expert testimony, and his own written statement — explaining why he believed a human had made this, or at least that human emotion and memory had been present in its making.
The Bureau accepted it as "pending verification."
He didn't know the outcome.
But he'd listened to the composition many times. There was a transition — B-flat major to F-sharp minor — unconventional, very clean. Like someone searching for the right word, for a long time, and finally finding it.
He couldn't prove AI hadn't written it. But he'd never heard that feeling in anything a machine had made.
Maybe that was enough.
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