The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently affirmed a decision by the U.S. Copyright Office in which the USCO denied an application to register a work authored entirely by an artificial intelligence program.
The case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, challenging U.S. copyright law’s human authorship requirement, is the first of its kind in the United States, but will definitely not be the last, as questions regarding the originality and protectability of generative AI created works continue to arise. The court in Thaler focused on the fact that the work at issue had no human authorship, setting a clear rule for one end of the spectrum. As the court recognized, the more difficult questions that will need to be addressed include how much human input is required to qualify the user as the creator of a work such that it is eligible for copyright protection.
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