In her decision, she wrote that no work has ever been granted a copyright without a "guiding human hand." (Image: Alex Knight/Pexels)
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US District Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork is not eligible for copyright protection, as noted by the Hollywood Reporter. The ruling came in response to Stephen Thaler’s attempt to challenge the government’s refusal to register works made by AI.
Judge Howell said that copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand.” She emphasised that U.S. copyright law “protects only works of human creation” and is “designed to adapt with the times.” She added that there has been a consistent understanding that human creativity is “at the core of copyrightability, even as that human creativity is channeled through new tools or into new media.”
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Thaler had tried several times to register the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have named the AI as the author and Thaler as the owner, but he was rejected every time.
After the final rejection last year, Thaler sued the government, claiming that its denial was “arbitrary, capricious … and not in accordance with the law.” But Judge Howell disagreed. In her decision, she wrote that no work has ever been granted a copyright without a “guiding human hand.” She also explained that the purpose of copyright law is to encourage “human individuals to engage in” creation.
Judge Howell also said that copyrights and patents were conceived as “forms of property that the government was established to protect, and it was understood that recognising exclusive rights in that property would further the public good by incentivising individuals to create and invent.” She stated that “The act of human creation — and how to best encourage human individuals to engage in that creation, and thereby promote science and the useful arts — was thus central to American copyright from its very inception.”
The ruling concluded by asserting that copyright law was not meant to cover nonhuman actors.
The ruling came as courts are considering the legality of AI companies using copyrighted works to train their systems. The lawsuits, filed by artists and writers in California federal court, accuse the companies of infringing their rights and could lead to the destruction of their large language models.
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In March, the government confirmed that most works created by AI are not protected by copyright, but clarified that some AI-assisted works could qualify if a human had a “sufficiently creative” role in selecting or arranging them. It said that an application for a work made with AI could support a claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship.”
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