DC court rules AI-only artwork cannot be copyrighted

Judge Beryl Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in Thaler v. Perlmutter that a work generated entirely by an artificial intelligence system, without a human hand guiding its creation, cannot be registered for copyright. The ruling affirmed a decision the Copyright Office had already reached that February when it deregistered part of the AI-illustrated comic Zarya of the Dawn: copyright protects human creativity, not machine output.

The case turned on Stephen Thaler’s application to register “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” an image he said had been produced autonomously by his Creativity Machine software, with Thaler listed as the work’s owner by virtue of owning the machine, not as its author. The Copyright Office had refused registration on the grounds that US copyright law requires a human author. Thaler sued, arguing the requirement was neither in the statute’s text nor consistent with the law’s purpose of encouraging the creation of new works.

Howell rejected that argument, writing that copyright had “never stretched so far… as to protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand.” She grounded the ruling in the Constitution’s copyright clause, the Copyright Act’s text, and more than a century of precedent denying protection to non-human creators, including a widely cited case involving a monkey’s selfie. The court did note, in a footnote, that Thaler had raised arguments about his own role in designing and directing the system too late in the proceedings to be considered — leaving open, for later cases, how much human involvement in an AI-assisted work is enough to qualify for protection.

The ruling did not address the far larger and more commercially consequential question of whether human-guided use of generative AI tools, as opposed to fully autonomous output, could be copyrighted — a question the Copyright Office and courts would spend the following years working through, including further Copyright Office guidance in January 2025. Thaler appealed; the DC Circuit later affirmed the decision, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.