\n<\/p>\n
Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image \u201cas a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,\u201d which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork\u2019s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
After the Office\u2019s final rejection last year, Thaler sued the Office, claiming its denial was \u201carbitrary, capricious … and not in accordance with the law,\u201d but Judge Howell didn\u2019t see it that way. In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was \u201cabsent any guiding human hand,\u201d adding that \u201chuman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
That\u2019s been borne out in past cases cited by the judge, like that one involving a monkey selfie<\/a>. To contrast, Judge Howell noted a case in which a woman compiled a book from notebooks she\u2019d filled with \u201cwords she believed were dictated to her\u201d by a supernatural \u201cvoice\u201d was worthy of copyright. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Judge Howell did, however, acknowledge that humanity is \u201capproaching new frontiers in copyright,\u201d where artists will use AI as a tool to create new work. She wrote that this would create \u201cchallenging questions regarding how much human input is necessary\u201d to copyright AI-created art, noting that AI models are often trained on pre-existing work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Stephen Thaler plans to appeal the case. His attorney, Ryan Abbot of Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP, said, \u201cWe respectfully disagree with the court\u2019s interpretation of the Copyright Act,\u201d according to Bloomberg Law<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>which also reported a US Copyright Office statement saying it believed the court\u2019s decision was the right one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nobody really knows<\/a> how things will shake out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed suit against OpenAI and Meta<\/a> earlier this year over their models\u2019 data scraping practices, for instance, while another lawsuit<\/a> by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data scraping by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI amounted to software piracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n