U.S. Supreme Court rules AI cannot hold Copyrights
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot legally hold copyrights for original artistic works or content it creates.
The Supreme Court dismissed on the 2nd, local time, a lawsuit filed by a Missouri-based computer engineer challenging the copyright status of AI-generated works. The ruling aligns with lower courts, which had previously determined that AI cannot be recognized as a copyright holder for its creations.
Stephen Thaler, a resident of St. Charles, Missouri, applied in 2018 for a federal copyright for the visual art piece *A Recent Entrance to Paradise*, created by his AI system ‘DABUS’ (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). The work depicts railroad tracks leading into a circular tunnel-like entrance amid green and purple plant-like forms. Thaler sought to register the AI itself as the copyright holder.
However, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected the application in 2022, citing the legal requirement that copyright protection applies only to works created by human authors. Thaler appealed, but the Supreme Court upheld the Copyright Office’s decision. The court emphasized that “human authorship is a foundational requirement of copyright law,” clarifying that the term ‘author’ explicitly refers to humans, not machines.
Earlier, the Copyright Office had also stated that while humans may hold copyrights for works incorporating AI-generated elements, the rights belong solely to the human creator, not the AI.
As AI-generated images and videos proliferate rapidly, debates over the scope of copyright for AI-created content are expected to intensify.