A computer scientist who tried to register an artwork that credited an artificial intelligence system as the sole author lost his appeal on Tuesday.
A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously agreed with the Copyright Office that Stephen Thaler's AI software cannot be granted authorship. Copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being," Judge Patricia Millett wrote in her opinion.
"Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration," Millett wrote.
Thaler had tried to argue that copyright laws were woefully outdated, and laws should change to copyright works made by a generative AI software that he created called the "Creativity Machine." He further claimed that "judicial opinions 'from the Gilded Age' could not settle the question of whether computer-generated works are copyrightable today."
Nowhere in the Copyright Act is "author" defined, Thaler argued, potentially leaving room for today's courts to interpret the statute as permitting wholly AI-generated works to be copyrighted. Throwing the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of "author" at the court, Thaler invited the court to land on a looser interpretation than the Copyright Office was willing to make. If the court did not take his side, Thaler fretted that artists wouldn't be incentivized to use AI to produce creative works, defeating the purpose of copyright laws, he argued.
"Nothing in the Copyright Act requires human creation," Thaler argued in court last January, Reuters reported. "What the Act's language indicates is that when an entity—a natural person, a corporation, a machine—generates a creative work, that entity is the author."