Supreme Court Declines Case on Granting Copyright to AI-Created Art
A legal battle over AI copyright that has lasted for more than a decade may have reached its end, with the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear a case involving AI-generated visual art.
The subject of the case is an image created by computer scientist Stephen Thaler in 2012, titled “A Recent Entry into Paradise,” using an AI tool he also created, DABUS. Thaler applied for a copyright for his visual art in 2018, but the application was ultimately rejected by the U.S. Copyright Office on the grounds that creative works must have human authorship to be eligible. A district court later upheld the decision.
Thaler’s legal team argued that because he created the system that generated the artwork, he is in fact its author.
“Other countries, such as China and the United Kingdom, already allow copyright protection for AI-generated works. But the Copyright Office’s reliance on its own non-statutory requirements has led to inappropriate framing of U.S. copyright law, inconsistent with this Court’s precedent that copyright law must adapt to technological progress,” the filing asserts.
“The Copyright Office believes that the Supreme Court reached the correct result, confirming that human authorship is required for copyright,” a spokesperson said.
In an email to CNET, Thaler said that although the court declined to hear his appeal, “I view this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat.”
While he’s not sure whether the lawsuits will proceed, Thaler says he’s still certain that copyright law, as written, is intended to exclude non-human inventors.
“In integrating DABUS into the legal system, I was confronted with a question long confined to theory: whether invention and creativity should remain tied to humans or whether autonomous computer processes can truly generate ideas,” says Thaler.
He previously alleged in court that the Copyright Office’s decision would negatively impact the development of AI and its use by the creative industries during the important early years of the technology’s development.
This AI-designed image was created in 2012 using a tool called DABUS, developed by computer scientist Stephen Thaler. The artwork is the subject of a copyright battle that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear.
He warns that the Copyright Office’s current rules could create a “perfect storm” of low-quality AI-generated content that will continue to flood the Internet and a wave of lawsuits from humans claiming ownership of works they did not create.
“The law lags behind what technology can already do,” Thaler says. “The court looked at what the law currently allows. It did not address what the technology has already achieved.”
