US Court Rules AI-Generated Artwork Not Subject to Copyright

A work of art created by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be protected by copyright under US law, a US court in Washington DC has decided.

Only works with human input can be copyrighted, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said Friday, upholding the Copyright Office’s rejection of an application filed by computer scientist Stephen Thaler on behalf of his DABUS system.

Friday’s decision follows Thaler’s losses in U.S. patent bids covering inventions he says were created by DABUS, which stands for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience.

Thaler has also applied for patents produced by DABUS in other countries such as the UK, South Africa, Australia and Saudi Arabia with limited success.

Thaler’s attorney, Ryan Abbott, said Monday that he and his client strongly disagree with the decision and will appeal. The copyright office said in a statement on Monday that it “believes the court reached the right result.”

The rapidly growing field of generative artificial intelligence has raised new questions regarding intellectual property rights. The Copyright Office has also rejected an artist’s bid to copyright images created through the Midjourney AI system, despite the artist claiming the system was part of their creative process.

Several pending lawsuits have also been filed over the use of copyrighted works to practice creative AI without permission.

“We’re approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put artificial intelligence in their toolbox,” raising “challenges” in copyright law, Howell wrote Friday.

“However, this case is not nearly as complicated,” Howell said.

In 2018, Thaler applied for a copyright covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” a piece of visual art that he said was created by his artificial intelligence system without human input. The agency rejected the application last year, saying creative works must have human factors to be copyrighted.

Thaler challenged the decision in federal court, arguing that human-making is not a concrete statutory requirement and that allowing artificial intelligence to be copyrighted would be consistent with the purpose of copyright under the US Constitution to “promote the advancement of science and the useful arts”.

Howell agreed with the Copyright Office, saying that human-making is a “basic requirement of copyright” based on “centuries of settled understanding.”