Photo Credit: Igor Omilaev
A federal appeals court unanimously ruled that AI-generated works without human involvement do not qualify for copyright protection in the US.
Computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler created a generative artificial intelligence (genAI) called “Creativity Machine,” which generated a picture Thaler titled, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”
The US Copyright Office denied Thaler’s application, citing a requirement that work must be authored by a human being. Thaler had listed his Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author.
Thaler challenged the decision, but the US District Court for the District of Columbia, a federal court, upheld the Copyright Office’s decision. Thaler appealed; the federal appeals court affirmed the federal district court’s ruling.
“The Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authorized in the first instance by a human being,” said Circuit Judge Patricia A. Millett for US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “Even if the human authorship requirement were at some point to stymie the creation of original work, that would be a policy for Congress to address.”
The Copyright Office has permitted the registration of works made by human authors who have used artificial intelligence. The issue remains over how much AI contributes to a human author’s work. In Thaler’s case, he listed his genAI as the sole author.
“Photography, sound recordings, video recordings, and computer programs are all technologies that were once novel, but which copyright law now applies,” Judge Millett continued, noting that Congress is key in updating copyright law, not the courts.
“[The Court’s] well-reasoned holding is consistent with decades of copyright law and the holdings of other courts that have considered similar questions and found the same result — that to be copyrightable, an expressive work must be created by a human,” said Alicia Calzada, Deputy General Counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). “That is why several years ago, a court held that a selfie taken by a monkey was not copyrightable, and it is why images created solely by AI are not copyrightable.”
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