U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled on Friday that only writings by human writers are eligible for copyright protection, upholding the Copyright Office’s decision to deny computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s application on behalf of his DABUS system.

The story is as follows as stated in the ruling U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell handed down.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler owns a computer system he calls the “Creativity Machine,” which he claims generated a piece of visual art of its own accord. He sought to register the work for copyright, listing the computer system as the author and explaining that the copyright should transfer to him as the owner of the machine.

The Copyright Office denied the application on the grounds that the work lacked human authorship, a prerequisite for a valid copyright to issue, in the view of the Register of Copyrights. Plaintiff challenged that denial, culminating in this lawsuit against the United States Copyright Office and Shira Perlmutter, in her official capacity as the Register of Copyrights and the Director of the United States Copyright Office (“defendants”).

Both parties have now moved for summary judgment, which motions present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright.

Plaintiff develops and owns computer programs he describes as having “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) capable of generating original pieces of visual art, akin to the output of a human artist. One such AI system—the so-called “Creativity Machine”—produced the work at issue here, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise:”

After its creation, plaintiff attempted to register this work with the Copyright Office. In his application, he identified the author as the Creativity Machine, and explained the work had been “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” but that plaintiff sought to claim the copyright of the “computer-generated work” himself “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.”

In a federal court appeal, Thaler argued that the judgment should not have been made and that permitting AI copyrights would be consistent with the aim of copyright as stated in the U.S. constitution to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

The Copyright Office and Howell both agreed that human authorship is a “bedrock requirement of copyright” based on “centuries of settled understanding.”

Source: UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA Case 1:22-cv-01564-BAH

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