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ARTICLE · 04 APRIL 2025

Human Intelligence Still Required For Copyright Authorship, Circuit Court Rules

Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, PC
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Only humans can be authors under the Copyright Act, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in a unanimous opinion on March 18, 2025.

United StatesIntellectual Property
Dasha Chestukhin
Dasha Chestukhin

Only humans can be authors under the Copyright Act, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in a unanimous opinion on March 18, 2025.

The Court considered whether an artificial intelligence model could be an "author" of a work for copyright purposes – and answered "no." In doing so, however, the court left open the crucial question of whether a human can be the "author" of an AI-generated work where he made and used the AI to generate the work.

In this case, computer scientist Stephen Thaler created a generative AI he named the "Creativity Machine," which in turn generated the below image, titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise" (the "Work"). Thaler applied to register the Work, listing the Creativity Machine as its sole author and himself as the Work's owner.

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