The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator.
Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.
The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.
Why would anyone think that they could copyright something that they didn’t make?
Maybe you can trademark the prompt or whatever, but in the end of the day, you didn’t make shit, so why would you own the copyright?
In the immortal words of everyone ever, pick up a fucking pencil.
That’s not what this case was about. Thaler wasn’t trying to copyright the image himself.
That’s what the article says. What are you saying this case was about?
I explained it in detail in a comment I put on the root of the thread. In a nutshell, Thaler is declaring “I am not the copyright holder of this artwork, the AI itself is the copyright holder of the artwork. I want to register this artwork’s copyright to the AI that produced it.”
The copyright office - and, subsequently, all the courts he has appealed the case to - have told him “but an AI is not a legal person, so an AI cannot hold copyright to the artwork. And you are declaring that you yourself are not the holder of the copyright, you are quite insistent on that. So this artwork has no copyright holder. That means it’s public domain.”
This is an important distinction. The court isn’t ruling that AI art in general is in the public domain. It’s ruling that this art is in the public domain because this guy trying to register it is insisting that it was created without any human involvement. Unfortunately a lot of news articles miss this distinction because a headline declaring “AI art ineligible for copyright” draws a ton of clicks. This has been going on for over three years now, at least.
Criminy, I just checked. Thaler began jousting this windmill in 2018, that’s when he first made this ridiculous application. Years before modern generative AI came onto the scene. The Thaler v. Perlmutter case started in mid-2022. He is a very persistent loon.