Thaler v. Perlmutter

Thaler v. Perlmutter, decided March 18th, 2025. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Millett, affirmed the denial of a copyright registration for an image generated by an artificial-intelligence system. The court held that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires a work to be authored, in the first instance, by a human being — and that a machine cannot be the author. Here's the brief.

Dr. Stephen Thaler is a computer scientist who builds AI systems. He created a generative model he calls the Creativity Machine, which produced a picture he titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." Thaler applied to register the work with the Copyright Office. On the application, he listed the author as the Creativity Machine and himself as the owner, and described the work as created autonomously by machine.

The Copyright Office denied the application under its longstanding requirement that a work be authored by a human. Its Review Board affirmed, relying on Thaler's own representation that the work was autonomously created by AI without any human creative contribution.

Thaler sought review in the District Court for the District of Columbia, which affirmed, calling human authorship a bedrock requirement of copyright. He then appealed to the D.C. Circuit. Throughout, Thaler's own position was that the work had no human author — a framing that, as the courts noted, defined the case.

The question: can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976? The Act does not define the word "author," so the court applied ordinary tools of statutory interpretation — and found the statute's text and structure presuppose a human.

Provision after provision, the court explained, makes sense only if the author is a human. Copyright vests immediately in the author, so an author must be able to own property. The term is measured by the author's lifespan. Rights pass to a widow or children. A transfer needs a signature. Protection depends on the author's nationality or domicile. Machines fit none of these.

The court also noted that the Copyright Office had read "author" to require a human since before the 1976 Act, and that Congress adopted that settled meaning when it reenacted the term.

The court rejected Thaler's fallback that he could claim the work under the work-made-for-hire doctrine.

Because the work was never eligible for copyright in the first place, there was nothing for the machine's "employer" to hold. And the court declined to reach Thaler's separate argument that he was the author because he made and used the machine — he had waived it before the agency and did not properly raise it on appeal. Having decided the case on the statute, the court did not reach the Copyright Office's argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship.

Thaler is the first federal appellate decision to hold that a work generated autonomously by an AI system, with no human author, cannot be registered under the Copyright Act. The holding is grounded in statutory text, and it is framed by the record Thaler built: he told the Copyright Office the work had no human author. The court expressly left the larger questions — how copyright law should treat AI-assisted creation — to Congress and the Copyright Office.

Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039, decided March 18th, 2025. I'm Kyle Coleman. Thanks for watching.