US Federal Judge Rejects Copyright Protection For AI-Generated Work

The US Copyright Office and subsequent court decisions have consistently denied the right to copyright protection for AI-generated work because it is not the product of direct human involvement. 

While computer scientists may argue that they created the AI that created the work, a century of copyright jurisprudence suggests that the law will continue to maintain that standard for the immediate future, especially as the programmers are trying to have it both ways: insisting on copyright protection but an AI but arguing their own efforts created the AI. JL

ArtForum reports:

A federal judge rejected a computer scientist’s attempt to copyright AI–generated artwork, upholding a March decision issued by the US Copyright Office. The judge ruled a work created in 2012 using AI (the creator) designed himself, is not eligible for copyright as it is “absent any human involvement,” which, (the judge) wrote, is a “bedrock requirement of copyright.” (It) was initially rejected on the grounds it was not the product of a human mind. “(He) must provide evidence the work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence,” wrote the review board. “He has done neither.” Subsequent attempts to copyright the work failed.

A federal judge last week rejected a computer scientist’s attempt to copyright an AI–generated artwork, thus upholding a March decision on the matter issued by the US Copyright Office. Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia on August 18 ruled that A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a work that Stephen Thaler created in 2012 using DABUS, an AI system he designed himself, is not eligible for copyright as it is “absent any human involvement,” which, Howell wrote, is a “bedrock requirement of copyright.” Thaler’s lawyer, Ryan Abbott, has said he will appeal the ruling.

Thaler first attempted to register the work, which depicts a set of train tracks vanishing into a tunnel amid what appears to be a verdant landscape, with the copyright office in 2018, listing Creativity Machine, the name he awarded his AI generator, as the creator. Describing A Recent Entrance to Paradise as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” he sought to copyright it as a “work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” aka himself. His claim was initially rejected on the grounds that it was not the product of a human mind. “Thaler must either provide evidence that the work is the product of human authorship or convince the Office to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence,” wrote the review board tartly. “He has done neither.” Subsequent attempts on Thaler’s part to copyright the work failed.

Howell’s ruling arrives as the use of AI surges in the art world, as in so many other sectors, with creators suing popular AI-generative platforms for scraping their artworks without their permission, and for using their writing to train machines’ algorithms. Outside of copyright law, the question of whether AI-generated work constitutes “real” art continues to be hotly debated.