The United States Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia has confirmed that human authorship is a fundamental requirement for copyright protection; a work made by employing Artificial Intelligence systems is protectable under the US Copyright Act of 1976, but the application for registration must indicate a human as author of the work.

On 18 March 2025, the United States Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia confirmed that human authorship is a requirement for copyright protection, and ruled out eligibility of Artificial Intelligence systems to own copyrights.

The appeal had been filed by Mr Stephen Thaler, artificial intelligence scientist and founder of Imagination Engines, Inc., a company that develops advanced AI systems.

The facts in the case

In 2018, Mr Thaler had filed an application to register with the US Copyright Office (the Office) a work of art titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, made by the “Creativity Machine”, a generative AI system built by Mr. Thaler himself. In the application, Mr Thaler named the Creativity Machine as the only author of the work.

The Office rejected the application on the grounds that human authorship “in the first instance” is a requirement for registration under US Copyright Act of 1976 – a requirement that the application concerning A Recent Entrance to Paradise failed to meet.

Mr Thaler opposed the Office’s decision first administratively and then before a court of law, claiming first of all that US Copyright law does not rule out copyright protection for AI-generated works and secondly that the Copyright Act’s “work-made-for-hire” provision allows him to be considered the author of the work at issue because the Creativity Machine is his employee.

In February 2022, the US District Court for the District of Washington, DC (the District Court) issued a decision rejecting all of Mr Thaler’s arguments and confirming the Office’s rejection of the application. The District Court found that human authorship is indeed a fundamental requirement for a work to be registered under the Copyright Act, and that rules on work made for hire do not apply unless there is an interest to claim copyright protection – and as the Creativity Machine is not entitled to copyright because it is not a human, it can have no interest in claiming it.

The District Court also pointed out that in Mr Thaler’s application to the Office for copyright registration, the Creativity Machine was indicated as the work’s sole author, while Mr Thaler was listed merely as the work’s owner. Mr Thaler had therefore waived the right to be recognised as author of the work.

Mr Thaler appealed against the decision before the United States Court of Appeal of the District of Columbia (the Court of Appeal).

The ruling of the Court of Appeal

The decision of the Court of Appeal, issued on 18 March 2025, entirely confirmed both the findings and the ruling of the District Court.

The higher court’s decision further points out that works generated by employing AI systems can be, and in fact have been already, registered under the Copyright Act, but only in cases in which the authorship of the work is listed in the application as human.

According to the Court of Appeal, there is no question that the Copyright Act requires human authorship for a work to be eligible for protection, and it is clear that the legislator’s intention was that of reserving copyrights for human beings.

The Court of Appeal’s final comment on the case is that “even if the human authorship requirement were at some point to stymy the creation of original work, that would be a policy argument for Congress to address”, not for a court.

Mr Thaler has long been filing applications with intellectual property offices world wide in support of the idea that artificial intelligence systems should be eligible to hold intellectual property rights on their output; such efforts have so far been mostly unsuccessful.

Read here about the patent applications in which Mr Thaler has named the DABUS AI system as inventor here.

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