Supreme Court Decides Against Hearing AI Copyright Case

“A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Photo Credit: Stephen Thaler/DABUS

The Supreme Court has opted against hearing a case concerning an attempt to copyright AI-generated artwork – thereby leaving in place an appellate court’s determination that the Copyright Act “requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.”

That cert rejection surfaced (along with a number of others) in a Supreme Court order list yesterday, just shy of one year after an appeals court unanimously ruled against the appellant. Said appellant, computer scientist Stephen Thaler, initially sued in 2022 after the Copyright Office rejected his 2018 registration application for an AI image entitled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”

(More than an AI enthusiast, Thaler is the developer behind the Creativity Machine, which pumped out “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” He’s also penned multiple AI research articles and claims to have equipped his “artificial inventors…with learning rules to bind memories.” Per his website, “feelings or sentience was the result” of those learning rules.)

This application listed the Creativity Machine as the art’s lone author, Thaler himself as the work’s owner, and, as highlighted, was promptly denied by the USCO. A couple registration-reconsideration pushes and one district court battle later, the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld the lower-court ruling in March 2025.

In its decision, the appeals court pointed to all manner of Copyright Act elements – required signatures, protections tied to the creator’s lifespan, an inheritance provision, and more – implying human authorship as a condition for registration.

“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,” Circuit Judge Patricia Millett summed up.

As for the precedent’s bigger-picture significance, Judge Millett further noted the role of Congress, not the courts, in implementing largescale copyright-law changes.

In the absence of concrete legislative guidance to the contrary, however, “the human authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence,” the judge reiterated.

What about protections for human-recorded covers of AI music? Or human-captured photographs of AI art? Not to mention situations where registrants “borrow” heavily from AI and then claim authorship.

Well, the appeals court acknowledged a lack of firm answers to these and similar questions; Thaler’s case, the opinion spelled out, only addressed AI’s being listed as the sole author of a work.

“Those line-drawing disagreements over how much artificial intelligence contributed to a particular human author’s work are neither here nor there in this case,” Judge Millett wrote. “That is because Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the sole author of the work before us, and it is undeniably a machine, not a human being.”