A US federal judge has upheld a finding from the US Copyright Office that a piece of art created entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) is not protected under US copyright laws.
District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell made the ruling on Friday in response to a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office brought by Stephen Thaler.
Thaler had brought the suit after the organisation had refused to issue a copyright to an image, titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which was generated by the Creativity Machine algorithm he had created.
He had attempted to copyright the image on numerous occasions “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine” but was rejected by the US Copyright Office.
The Copyright Office had said that “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” was an essential element of copyright protection.
Thaler called the Copyright Office’s decision “arbitrary” and “capricious” and argued that it was not in accordance with US copyright law.
Judge Howell disagreed, noting that copyright had never been given to work that was “absent any guiding human hand”.
Judge: ‘Human authorship a bedrock of copyright’
She added that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright”.
In the written ruling, she said that while cameras were able to generate a mechanical reproduction of a scene, they also required a human “mental conception” of the image.
The concept of human control and creative control was key to deciding whether an image fell under copyright protection, she added.
She did concede, however, that society was approaching “new frontiers in copyright” and that questions would continue to be raised concerning how much human input was required.
Court cases have been growing in regard to AI and copyright – though often in the other direction.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, for example, filed a suit alongside two other authors against OpenAI and Meta over their data scraping practices for AI training.
The ruling, which follows similar decisions around the world, including Europe, could have implications beyond image generation.
The current Writers Guild of America strike in the US has highlighted fears of studios turning to generative AI to create new movie and TV scripts.
Unless the current legal views shifted, those same studios may be incredibly wary of producing works that didn’t have the same copyright protection as human-penned scripts.
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