The omnipresence of AI currently raises questions not only about the promise of truthfulness made by technical media, but also about their legal regulation. Generative models such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion 3.5, Flux, and Lavida-O generate new visual worlds that make it urgent to redefine legal norms. In legal history, technical images like photography and film have always been actants in the negotiation of copyright, intellectual property rights, or the right to one's own image. When judges wear VR glasses and thus virtualize the courtroom, forensic image evidence is analyzed digitally, or future scenarios in climate lawsuits are imagined with the help of attribution models, operational images help constitute legal infrastructures. The new volume of Bildwelten des Wissens examines, at the intersection of Bildwissenschaft, media theory, and jurisprudence, the legal forms in which technical images are embedded and, conversely, how new image forms in digital environments are putting pressure on legal norms.

• Connects current debates about copyright, authorship, and intellectual property with the media history of photography, film, and AI art
• Interdisciplinary and international perspectives from visual and media studies, legal theory, and comic illustration
•  With the first publication of an excerpt from Cornelia Vismann's Schrift Verfassung nach dem Computer (2006/2007)