Federal Judge: AI Artwork Not Copyright Protected

Artwork created by artificial intelligence isn’t eligible for copyright protection because it lacks human authorship, a Washington, D.C., federal judge decided Friday, Bloomberglaw.com reported.

Judge Beryl A. Howell, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office’s decision to deny a copyright registration to computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who argued a two-dimensional artwork created by his AI program “Creativity Machine” should be eligible for protection.

The ruling is the first to establish a boundary on the legal protections for AI-generated artwork, which has grown in popularity with the rise of products like OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, Bloomberglaw.com reported.

Howell found that “courts have uniformly declined to recognize copyright in works created absent any human involvement,” citing cases where copyright protection was denied for celestial beings, a cultivated garden, and a monkey who took a selfie, Bloomberglaw.com reported.

“Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works,” the judge wrote.

The rise of generative AI will “prompt challenging questions” about how much human input into an AI program is necessary to qualify for copyright protection, Howell said, as well as how to assess the originality of AI-generated art that comes from systems trained on existing copyrighted works.

But this case “is not nearly so complex” because Thaler admitted in his application that he played no role in creating the work, Howell said.

Thaler, the president and CEO of Imagination Engines, sued the office in June 2022 following its denial of his application to register the AI-generated art piece titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”

His attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP, said he plans to appeal the judgment, Bloomberglaw.com reported. “We respectfully disagree with the court’s interpretation of the Copyright Act,” Abbott said.

The Copyright Office said in a statement that it believes the court reached the correct result, and the office is reviewing the decision.