Latest
  1. Johns Hopkins Bayview tells 3,182 patients an employee put their health data into a public AI tool
  2. China’s AI compute access expected to double in 2027, with US-designed chips about 65 per cent
  3. UK commits £100m to national AI Biosecurity Lab
  4. Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3.1 Pro with 1-million-token context window
  5. Residents in Newport and Cardiff oppose hyperscale datacentres near homes
  6. Study: Grok 4.7 picked Republicans in 92% of forced midterm answers, GPT-6.1 Sol picked Democrats in 97%
  7. Attackers exploiting the PHP flaws hand the break-in to AI agents, Unit 42 says
  8. Elvis Presley’s rightsholders sue Anthropic over training on 274 songs

Latest / Media, elections and online safety

Enforcement or court caseMediaUSConfirmed

US court upholds refusal to register an artwork made autonomously by an AI system

See how this story connects

Source: US District Court for the District of Columbia (memorandum opinion, via Wikisource)

Judge Beryl Howell of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on 18 August 2023 that the Copyright Office was right to refuse Stephen Thaler’s application for A Recent Entrance to Paradise, an image he said his Creativity Machine made autonomously. The court held that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright and granted the government summary judgment.

Why it matters

A federal court upheld the Copyright Office’s refusal to register a work made with no human author, so companies selling fully generated content cannot count on copyright to protect it.

When
18 Aug 2023
ID
WTA-N-2023-0081
Who
US Copyright Office; Stephen Thaler, Beryl Howell, Shira Perlmutter
Topics
Copyright
Authority
US District Court, D.C.
Target
Stephen Thaler
Action
ruling: human authorship required
Status
decided · Enforcement ledger

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from US District Court for the District of Columbia. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at US District Court for the District of Columbia

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Document the source offers: document 1 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextUK Supreme Court rules an AI system cannot be named as a patent inventor

Cite this story

WTA-N-2023-0081: “US court upholds refusal to register an artwork made autonomously by an AI system.” wheresthe.ai, 18 Aug 2023. https://wheresthe.ai/d/us-thaler-v-perlmutter-ruling-2023-08/ (source: US District Court for the District of Columbia (memorandum opinion, via Wikisource)).

Spotted an error? Email [email protected].