Google faces a lawsuit over its Lyria music AI allegedly training on copyrighted YouTube tracks. The case highlights a problem every creator now faces: when AI systems scrape your work without permission, copyright law protects you less than you think. The real issue isn't whether you own your work. It's whether you can prove when you created it. Copyright Registration Won't Save You From AI Scraping Most creators believe copyright registration provides bulletproof protection. They're wrong about the timeline. Copyright exists the moment you create something. But proving that moment in court requires evidence. A copyright certificate only proves you filed paperwork months after creation. In disputes over AI training data, that gap matters. Consider a musician who uploads an original track to SoundCloud in January. They register it with the Copyright Office in June. An AI company scrapes SoundCloud in March and trains a model that can generate similar music.…