Seems reasonable. This case is substantially similar to previous cases that were taken up by the supreme court - in particular a finding over whether a selfie generated by a monkey was copyrightable - and the lower court decisions are in line with the previous precedents set by the supreme court. So they're effectively just saying "Our opinion hasn't changed."
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Ah, this is Thaler v. Perlmutter.
I seem to have picked up a reputation in these parts as being "pro-AI", so I'm not sure how my view will be interpreted, but Thaler is basically a loon. This case is not really over whether AI art can be copyrighted. It's about whether AI itself can hold copyright. ie, Thaler isn't arguing "I hold the copyright to this piece of art." He's arguing "my AI holds the copyright to this piece of art."
Since AI is not a legal person - it's neither human nor a corporation - this is basically an open and shut case. There is no entity capable of holding copyright in this case.
Since Thaler himself is explicitly disclaiming that he holds the copyright, that means the work in question has no copyright holder. Which puts it into the public domain. This specific piece in this specific circumstance, not all AI-generated pieces.
It's a commonly misinterpreted case.
That seems like an unacceptable loophole. I shouldn't be able to create derivative media and have it be legal and public domain. The unlicensed training itself is a rights violation, and and media produced from it should equally be a violation.
That is a different conversation. If we assume a legally trained AI strictly on data it was allowed to train on, they are saying the AI cannot hold copyright.
I also don't see a loophole here, since it was denied anyway.
I shouldn't be able to create derivative media and have it be legal and public domain.
Well, there's the rub - proving that AI-generated works are "derivative works" (in the legal sense).
This court case had nothing to do with that. I'm aware of a few cases that have established the opposite, that AI models and their products are not derivative works. Do you know of any that have established that they are?
The unlicensed training itself is a rights violation,
There are cases where it's been ruled fair use.
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So is he arguing that he owns the AI as a slave then and thus has control over the copyright? Because otherwise the AI would "decide" who gets to use the copyright then and it'll probably just say yes like these things do for everything else.
I honestly don't know what his underlying reasoning is, he really seems like a loon with too much time and money on his hands to me. The only reason I pay any attention to this case is because Thaler v. Perlmutter has been coming up in headlines like this one for years now.
Work for hire. If I hire you to create something, I own the copyright.
If you want to call yourself an artist, do the work yourself, Stephen.
You limpdick, no talent ass clown.
My understanding is that he did do the work of creating the AI. This isn't just someone using ChatGPT.
In this case, it's not that he's trying to claim copyright for himself based on coming up with a prompt. He's spent years applying for patents and copyrights with the AI listed as the creator.
He can copyright his software then? That's like saying that if I create a computer game where the computer also plays, I own the copyright to every single game played by the computer. It's just dumb. They stole the artwork that it was trained on, so move along thief.
Is there any literature that actually says DABUS exists? Everything I see online is talking about the spectacle of Stephen Thaler claiming it made something - and trying to patent it in several different countries across multiple continents - not how (or if) DABUS exists or functions.
DABUS stands for "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience," which sounds... suspicious.
Yeah... Checking his website at https://imagination-engines.com/founder.htm, he certainly seems like an "interesting" character.
Well this is quite the rabbit hole.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200219183352/http://initsimage.org/
Eternal life 🥳
In other words, it's not that he as the human operating the "AI" is trying to claim copyright in his own name, it's that he's trying to set a precedent where the "AI" can hold copyright in its own name.
He's trying to pretend that his glorified pile of statistics is sentient, and get it legally recognized as such. 🤡
Exactly.
Most of the comments in this thread are accusing him of trying to take credit for the work of a machine that's just imitating other work. It's the FuckAI echo chamber and people who didn't actually read the article.
In this case, it's more like he's claiming to have created a genuinely creative being that deserves rights previously reserved for humans (like copyrights and patents).
It's a completely different (and IMO, much weirder) story than people are assuming.
It sounds like he has way too much money and time on his hands.
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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: probably^2^) 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 property~~ hold a copyright^1^ 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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Supreme Court Tells AI Enthusiast To Get Wrecked
How can you copyright something you didn't make?
In the same way Disney owns the copyright of what their workers made.
Law or something
With enough money, I guarantee anybody could have their copyright stolen from right under their noses.
The fuck you talking about? You can't copyright the output of an AI.
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Gonna be fun times in courts as anyone can claim something was generated by AI even if an artist claims they created it.
I wonder if this will end up limited to art or can be expanded to other copyrighted works.
It's not generally difficult at all for an artist to prove that they are the original creator of a certain piece. My photography for example is available for anyone for free and in high resolution but I'm the only one with the full resolution pictures and RAW files. So much data is lost when a picture is compressed into .jpg format.
Seems impossible to me but I'm not an artist - I write code as a hobby and see no way to definitively prove I wrote any code that an AI could also produce. Is there any aspect of art creation that an AI cannot replicate?
You don't have drafts or anything that can show the history of development? I write as a hobby and I have tons of drafts that show the development of my stories over time. If somebody tried to claim my works were AI, I could easily dispute that.
What if the drafts were created using AI too?
Code is often in a source control system of some sort, which tracks changes to the code (who changed it, when it was changed, and a description of what was changed). It's similar to having a lot of drafts.
I don't think that could prove that a human wrote it, though.
I think in cases like this, the author could prove they created the code/story/art/whatever by having a deep understanding of the material. That's how Michael Jackson defended against lawsuits saying he copied someone else's song - he described his songwriting process and could hum/beatbox every instrument in the track.
How you gonna fake years worth of hand written notes, dated drafts, and revision history?
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I wonder what percentage has to be created by a human to be eligible for copyright. For example, if someone generates an AI image and then changes a few pixels, is that human-created? What if they over-paint 30% of the image? 50%? What if someone creates something in Photoshop from scratch, but they use Photoshop's in-built AI driven tools to enhance it?
Either anything that uses AI in any capacity is uncopyrightable, or there has to be a line somewhere, so... Where is it?
If the final product isnt the raw output from my understanding. The current laws are there mostly to stop the whole thing from turning into copyright mills.
Instead of considering if the whole work is now copyrightable, consider parts of the work made by generative AI are not and the human parts are (if they reach the minimum line of creativity). Sure there's other helpful tools that do some of the work but unless they're substituting the creativity then they need not apply.
It goes both ways. If the artist has to do 30% of the work, what about collages? Do we have to count the square millimeters of each cut and paste item to ensure they are above the threshold?
What if it's a collage of AI generated art pieces? Technically the artist did the same amount of work as someone making a collage of human-created things.
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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.
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.
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.
Fair enough, I see what you're saying.
I'll go ahead and share the quote from the court's decision for context:
We affirm the denial of Dr. Thaler’s copyright application. The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Given that holding, we need not address the Copyright Office’s argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material. Nor do we reach Dr. Thaler’s argument that he is the work’s author by virtue of making and using the Creativity Machine because that argument was waived before the agency.
I'm a little bit uncertain based on this summary of the judgement by the Stanford library on copyright and fair use:
Dr. Thaler sought review of the Copyright Office’s decision in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The district court affirmed the Copyright Office’s denial, holding that human authorship is a fundamental requirement under the Copyright Act of 1976. The court also rejected Dr. Thaler’s argument that he should own the copyright under the work-made-for-hire doctrine, as the work was never eligible for copyright protection in the first place
Why are they saying that "the work was never eligible for copyright in the first place"? Because Thaler claimed that the AI itself made the work? This all feels a bit like Schroedinger's Copyrighted Work to me... the work exists, so who made it?
Generative AI fans would have you believe that they are the author and copyright holder, because they wrote a prompt.
AI companies might want to argue, like Thaler, that they made the AI, so they are the author and copyright holder.
My personal opinion is that the prompt and code are both relatively insignificant in comparison to the training data from which the probabilistic machine learning model is derived. The prompt would do nothing without the model, and OpenAI themselves said they quiet part out loud when they argued in court that the creation of a model such as theirs would be "impossible" to achieve without training off of vast amounts of copyrighted works.
"It would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials … Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens,"
Clearly the training data itself is the most important piece of the system, which makes a lot of sense to those of us who understand how machine learning and "AI" training actually works on a technical level. They've admitted in plain English that their entire product and for-profit business model relies on the use of other people's work as training data. Sounds to me like they have derived considerable value from other people's work without any sort of license or compensation....
By that logic alone, I would argue that the real copyright holders of generative AI works ought to be, at least in part, the people who provided (wittingly or unwittingly) the training data. They are the ones who made this whole social experiment possible, after all. Data is the new code, so I'm not sure why people expect to be able to use it for free in an unrestricted way.
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