D.C. Circuit Finds That a Computer System Can’t Register a Copyright in a Work it Generated

Androids may dream of electric sheep, but a computer system apparently can’t register copyright in work it generated. At least that’s the finding by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in its recent opinion in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2025 WL 839178 (D.C. Cir. 2025).

The court in Thaler framed the case as follows:

This case presents a question made salient by recent advances in artificial intelligence: Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976? The use of artificial intelligence to produce original work is rapidly increasing across industries and creative fields. Who—or what—is the “author” of such work is a question that implicates important property rights undergirding economic growth and creative innovation.

In this case, a computer scientist attributes authorship of an artwork to the operation of software. Dr. Stephen Thaler created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.” The Creativity Machine made a picture that Dr. Thaler titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Dr. Thaler submitted a copyright registration application for “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” to the United States Copyright Office. On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author and himself as just the work’s owner.

The Copyright Office denied Dr. Thaler’s application based on its established human-authorship requirement. This policy requires work to be authored in the first instance by a human being to be eligible for copyright registration. Dr. Thaler sought review of the Office’s decision in federal district court and that court affirmed.

In affirming the district court’s ruling, the Court of Appeals cited several provisions of the Copyright Act:

First, the Copyright Act’s ownership provision is premised on the author’s legal capacity to hold property….Because a copyright is fundamentally a property right created by Congress, and Congress specified that authors immediately own their copyrights, an entity that cannot own property cannot be an author under the statute.

Second, the Copyright Act limits the duration of a copyright to the author’s lifespan or to a period that approximates how long a human might live….Of course, machines do not have “lives” nor is the length of their operability generally measured in the same terms as a human life.

Third, the Copyright Act’s inheritance provision states that, when an author dies, that person’s “termination interest is owned, and may be exercised” by their “widow or widower,” or their “surviving children or grandchildren.”…Machines, needless to say, have no surviving spouses or heirs.

Fourth, copyright transfers require a signature. To transfer copyright ownership, there must be “an instrument of conveyance” that is “signed by the owner[.]”…Machines lack signatures, as well as the legal capacity to provide an authenticating signature.

Fifth, authors of unpublished works are protected regardless of the author’s “nationality or domicile.”…Machines do not have domiciles, nor do they have a national identity.

Sixth, authors have intentions. A joint work is one “prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.” 17 U.S.C. § 101. Machines lack minds and do not intend anything.

Seventh, and by comparison, every time the Copyright Act discusses machines, the context indicates that machines are tools, not authors.

The court then added that

All of these statutory provisions collectively identify an “author” as a human being. Machines do not have property, traditional human lifespans, family members, domiciles, nationalities, mentes reae, or signatures. By contrast, reading the Copyright Act to require human authorship comports with the statute’s text, structure, and design because humans have all the attributes the Copyright Act treats authors as possessing. The human-authorship requirement, in short, eliminates the need to pound a square peg into a textual round hole by attributing unprecedented and mismatched meanings to common words in the Copyright Act….

To be clear, we do not hold that any one of those statutory provisions states a necessary condition for someone to be the author of a copyrightable work. An author need not have children, nor a domicile, nor a conventional signature. Even the ability to own property has not always been required for copyright authorship. Married women in the nineteenth century authored work that was eligible for copyright protection even though coverture laws forbade them from owning copyrights….

The point, instead, is that the current Copyright Act’s text, taken as a whole, is best read as making humanity a necessary condition for authorship under the Copyright Act. That is the reading to which “the provisions of the whole law” point.

-CM