Background
The case began in June 2022, when Stephen Thaler, the developer of the Creativity Machine, sought copyright registration for an image identified in his application as “autonomously generated by an AI.” The Copyright Office refused registration under its established policy that the Office “will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.” The District Court upheld the refusal, and the Court of Appeals affirmed, concluding that “[h]uman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” The judgment confirms that under the Copyright Act of 1976 eligible work must be “authored in the first instance by a human being.” The case has since advanced to the Supreme Court of the United States (No 25A82), where Dr Thaler has filed a petition for certiorari.
AI Interaction
The District Court noted that the Copyright Office denied registration because “the work lacked human authorship, a prerequisite for a valid copyright to issue” and that the submission “was autonomously generated by an AI.” It concluded that “the Copyright Office acted properly in denying copyright registration for a work created absent any human involvement.” This reasoning places AI-generated material firmly outside the current scope of copyright protection and affirms that creative authorship under U.S. law remains limited to human creators.
The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the work at issue was “produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.” It held that “[n]othing can be considered the ‘writing of an author’ unless it owes its origin to a human agent.” By linking authorship exclusively to human creativity, the Court reaffirmed that AI systems such as the 'Creativity Machin'e cannot be recognised as authors or claimants under US copyright law.
Links:
- United States District Court for the District of Columbia
- United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
- Supreme Court of the United States
Note/Update:
- District Court: Dismissed the claim on the basis that AI-generated works are not copyrightable and a machine cannot be an “author.”
- Court of Appeals: Affirmed, stating that “[h]uman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”
- Supreme Court: Case entered under No 25A82.