SciActive Human Contribution Policy

Version 2

Version 1

Seal of Human Authorship

If your entire project is covered by and adheres to version 1, or later, of the SciActive Human Contribution Policy, without modification and without interruption since the date first adopted, you may use the following seal to affirm that you only accept human authored contributions (see license grant below).

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This seal is Copyright © 2026 by SciActive Inc and is not distributed under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license as the policy itself. SciActive Inc reserves all rights to this seal.

License Grant

SciActive Inc hereby grants you a nontransferable, perpetual, royalty free, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use this seal, without modification, in your project on the conditions that the project, in its entirety, is covered by and adheres to the unmodified SciActive Human Contribution Policy version 1 or newer, the coverage and adherence has been and continues to be uninterrupted since its initial adoption, with the exception of a migration to a newer or more limited version of the same policy, and only this one license for the seal has ever been granted for the project. If at any time the project becomes no longer covered by, or no longer adheres to, the initial policy, a newer version of the policy with the same or more limitations, or a more limited version of the policy, the license is revoked, and you must stop using the seal, permanently. This license may only be revoked for failure to meet and maintain these conditions.

Effectively, this means that if you temporarily or permanently remove or waive the policy, for any reason, including to accept AI generated contributions, you no longer have license or permission from SciActive Inc to use the seal, and you must remove it from your project, even if you reimplement the policy. You are allowed to move to a newer version of the policy, or move to a more limited (adding more exceptions) version of the policy. You are not allowed to move to a more broad (removing any exceptions) version of the policy without the license being revoked.

More Information

You can read more about SciActive’s stance on AI in email here, which contains links to supporting evidence for some of the reasoning in this policy. There is also a publicly available collection of supporting evidence for why one may wish to avoid generative AI in their projects.

You can read the US Copyright Office’s guidance on artificial intelligence here, and more information from the US Copyright Office here. These parts are particularly relevant:

In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.

– II. The Human Authorship Requirement

If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material.

– III. The Office’s Application of the Human Authorship Requirement

Some technologies allow users to provide iterative “feedback” by providing additional prompts to the machine. For example, the user may instruct the AI to revise the generated text to mention a topic or emphasize a particular point. While such instructions may give a user greater influence over the output, the AI technology is what determines how to implement those additional instructions.

– Footnote 30

Consistent with the Office’s policies described above, applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to provide a brief explanation of the human author’s contributions to the work. As contemplated by the Copyright Act, such disclosures are “information regarded by the Register of Copyrights as bearing upon the preparation or identification of the work or the existence, ownership, or duration of the copyright.”

– IV. Guidance for Copyright Applicants

You can read the US Patent and Trademark Office’s guidance for AI assisted inventions here. These parts are particularly relevant:

Conception is “the formation in the mind of the inventor, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention, as it is hereafter to be applied in practice.” Conception is complete when “the inventor has a specific, settled idea, a particular solution to the problem at hand, not just a general goal or research plan.”

– III. Governing Legal Standards

When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard set forth above in Section III.

– IV. Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions

The Copyright Alliance maintains a list of AI related cases involving copyright claims here.