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How D.C. Fed. Court Denied Copyright to AI-Created Artwork
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently upheld a final refusal by the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) to register a visual work entitled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." According to the application filed with the USCO by plaintiff Stephen Thaler, the image was not the product of human authorship but was instead "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine," which the plaintiff called the Creativity Machine and identified as the "author" of the work. The plaintiff named himself as the copyright claimant, however, on the basis that he was the "owner of the machine."
The USCO refused to register the work in August 2019 because it "lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim." This refusal was affirmed, on the same reasoning, through the internal appeals process within USCO. A final refusal by the Copyright Review Board on Feb. 14, 2022, led Thaler to file an action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. §706(2), claiming that the USCO's actions were "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law, unsupported by substantial evidence and in excess of [USCO's] statutory authority."
On cross-motions for summary judgment, U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell upheld the refusal to register in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 1:22-cv-01564 (D.D.C. 2023). Under black-letter APA law, the district court's ruling was limited to the administrative record that was before the Copyright Office. The court thus rejected the plaintiff's belated efforts to introduce evidence of his own human involvement in the creative process. Such evidence was not present in the record and, in fact, contradicted Thaler's own claims that the work was "autonomously created" by the Creativity Machine.
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