A federal judge ruled Friday that artificial intelligence (AI) generated art and material is ineligible for copyright protection — effectively safeguarding human authorship and original works in the marketplace.
Computer scientist Stephen Thaler created an AI program named “Creativity Machine” which in turn produced a work of art that he titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Thaler attempted to obtain a copyright for the United States Copyright Office, which denied his request, claiming that copyright may only apply to human creation.
“In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.”
U.S. Copyright Office policy guidance
Thaler, looking to appeal the denial, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Copyright Office and Shira Perlmutter, in her official capacity as the Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office.
Judge Beryl A. Howell, who oversaw the case, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, denied Thaler’s motion for summary judgment, affirming that the “defendants [U.S. Copyright Office, Perlmutter] are correct that human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.”
The judge’s ruling “changes absolutely nothing because the status quo has been that AI-generated works aren’t copyrightable,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, said, according to Politico. The law professor said that Thaler “boxed himself out of the ability to argue that his own contributions were enough for a copyright because [Thaler] wanted to go for the broader idea that AI could be an author.”
Thaler has been one of the first inventors to “push the boundaries of intellectual property rules” according to Politico. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler’s legal challenge against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in April after he was denied patents for designs created by a separate AI system of his invention, “DABUS.” Thaler also attempted to obtain patents on his AI inventions in 18 jurisdictions globally.
The ruling is consequential, not because it alters current copyright policy, but because it will ultimately set a precedent for future inventors and AI users who will seek to challenge the status quo on the legal front, in order to profit from the effortless creative content AI can produce.
