By Tessa Solomon | ARTnews
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday that artwork generated by artificial intelligence is not eligible for copyright protection because it lacks “human involvement,” reaffirming a March decision of the United States copyright office.
The ruling is the first in the US to establish boundaries on legal protections for AI-generated art, whose immense popularity has opened a nebulous legal frontier dictated—for better or worse—by assessments of aesthetics and originality.
Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the US Copyright Office’s decision to deny grant copyright protections to an artwork created by computer scientist Stephen Thaler using “Creativity Machine,” an AI system of his own design. Howell wrote in her motion that “courts have uniformly declined to recognize copyright in works created absent any human involvement.
Thaler, the founder of Imagination Engines, an artificial neural network technology company, sued the office in June 2022 after its denial of his copyright application for A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a two-dimensional image of train tracks stretching beneath a verdant stone arch. Thaler said the work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” according to court documents.
“Works created by artificial intelligence alone are not entitled to copyright protection. Copyrights protect ‘original works of authorship.’ Courts have long held that authorship requires human involvement. Although the issue of artificial intelligence is new, the issue of non-human intelligence is not. Elephants can paint. Monkeys can take photographs. But human laws do not protect non-human intellectual property. This makes sense. Intellectual property law addresses an inherent tension between the general human interest to freely use ideas and creators’ individual interests in owning their ideas. When non-human intelligence creates an idea, the law properly balances that tension in favor of the general human interest.” -Logan Elia, Rose Law Group partner and litigation attorney
