WASHINGTON: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a high-profile dispute over whether works created by artificial intelligence can be protected by copyright, leaving in place lower court rulings that only human-authored works are eligible for such protections.
The decision not to take up Thaler v. Perlmutter means that a federal appeals court’s finding — that art generated solely by an AI system cannot be copyrighted because it lacks human authorship — stands. The long-running case stemmed from computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s attempt to register a copyright for an image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which his AI system produced without traditional human creative input.
haler’s petition asked the nation’s highest court to resolve a question with sweeping implications for the burgeoning generative AI industry: whether works output by autonomous software can qualify as “original works of authorship” under U.S. law. Lower courts and the U.S. Copyright Office have repeatedly rejected that argument, emphasizing that existing statutes require a human creator.
In urging the Supreme Court to reject the petition, the U.S. government argued that the appeals court had correctly applied current law and that the Copyright Act assumes an author must be a human being.
Thaler’s legal team had contended that the refusal to grant copyright protection to entirely AI-generated content could chill innovation in creative technologies. In filings to the court, his counsel argued that existing doctrine “defies the constitutional goals” of promoting progress in the arts — a core purpose of the copyright system.
With Monday’s order, the Supreme Court left unresolved a legal issue poised to shape the future of art, technology and intellectual property in an era of rapidly advancing AI.