Reliance (whether a work was made from an existing work)
Japanese 依拠性
Reliance asks whether a work was made by looking at and building on someone else's existing work. Together with substantial similarity, both must be found before copyright infringement exists, so it matters when you use AI output.
Reliance asks whether a work was made by looking at someone else's work and building on it. Copyright infringement is not established just because a result looks like an existing work. Two things must both be found: that the result was made from the earlier work (reliance) and that the two are the same or closely alike (substantial similarity). It is like an exam: matching answers alone are not cheating; whether one person copied from the next desk is checked separately. The guide on preventing copyright disputes over generative AI outputs, published in June 2025 by Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Copyright Commission, explains that these two tests apply to AI outputs as they are.
Watch out If you give an AI the name of a specific work or a reference image and ask for something that looks like it, it becomes easy to show that the result was made from that work. For text and images you put on your website or in ads, note what you used as reference, and check for parts that resemble an existing work before publishing. The guide is reference material; the real judgment differs case by case.
Source: Guide to Preventing Copyright Disputes Related to Generative AI Outputs (Korean original listing) · Introduction to the Guide to Preventing Copyright Disputes Related to Generative AI Outputs · Review of two guides on copyright registration and dispute prevention related to generative AI (press release) · Guide to Preventing Copyright Disputes Related to Generative AI Outputs (English edition) (checked 2026-10-26)