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.
ITT: people misunderstanding the issue being ruled on (or rather, not being ruled on by letting the lower court decision stand).
If he had applied for copyright over the image generated using “AI” as a tool, it (edit: probably2) would have been granted, with him listed as the human author. But that’s not what he wanted. He’s apparently Hell-bent on trying to get the work registered in the name of the “AI” system itself as the author, to so that he can claim that the government recognized the “AI” as a sentient being that can
own propertyhold a copyright1 on its own behalf.This is not the broad ruling against AI slop copyrightability that people think it is. It’s a ruling against “AI” personhood.
(1 Copyright isn’t a property right, BTW)
(2 He explicitly claimed he gave no creative contribution and that the work was created completely autonomously, and the court’s ruling included excluding that from being copyrightable. It is if he hadn’t done that – if he had claimed he had directed it via prompts or whatever – that I think they would have granted the copyright to him as the human author. It turns out that he changed his mind and did make that argument on appeal, but the court explicitly ignored and did not rule on it because it wasn’t raised in his initial complaint.)
This is wildly wrong in so many ways.
Copyright is an intellectual property right, firmly grounded in property law doctrine–you are probably thinking of trademark, which is rooted in consumer protection law, or likeness rights which have their roots in privacy law.
The copyrightability of AI generated content gets to where the nexus of creativity happens. Effectively, image generators (modern ones–i actually don’t think DABUS is a diffusion model) are operated like a commissioned work. The user gives detailed instruction on par with what you might see in a commissioned work, and the creative event occurs when the “contractor” interprets that into the work. The copyright may be assigned or it may be licensed, in any case, the initial copyright holder is the contractor–or in our case, the model. Now, it is well established that only humans can have sua sponte property rights, including intellectual property right. Those can be assigned, licensed, etc., but they must first inher to a human and so an AI system literally has no copyright to assign, were it even able to engage in a contractual agreement to transfer said rights. As a result, no, there is no copyright in AI generated content and without a significant change in law there is unlikely to ever be any.
If he had sought to register the copyright under purely his own name, he would have been committing a fraud on the copyright office. This wasn’t explicitly established at the time of his suit, but it has been very explicitly the case now for over a year. When registering copyright you must declare any AI-generated components. Failure, or refusal, to do so constitutes a fraud on the office and such fraud is sanctionable up to revoking the copyright in the work in its entirety, even if the AI-gen component was only partial. This is really important to note with software copyright and the kind of litigation we’re likely to see wrt piracy in the future (i.e., defendant claims plaintiffs did not declare vibe coded components and thus committed a fraud on the office and should be sanctioned with full revocation of the right as a signal to other would-be claimants).
First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.
Second, copyright cannot be a property right because ideas cannot be property. In fact, ideas are essentially the opposite of property, as Thomas Jefferson once pointed out:
What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.
You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.
Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.
This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.
If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).
Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.
And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.
Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.
And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.
You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.
on that note: