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Can a machine be a muse? More pressingly, can it be an author?
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems generate paintings, compose music and draft novels with increasing sophistication, intellectual property law faces a reckoning it was never designed to handle. The question of whether AI-generated works deserve copyright protection has now found its way through courts on nearly every continent, producing divergent answers that reveal a deeper tension: our legal systems were built around the assumption that only humans create. Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist and creator of an AI system called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), has methodically tested that assumption in jurisdiction after jurisdiction and the results make for some of the most fascinating IP litigation of our time.
The Global Battleground
Thaler’s litigation campaign has generated rulings across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, each wrestling with substantially similar facts but arriving at strikingly different outcomes.
In the United Kingdom, the England and Wales Court of Appeal considered two patent applications in which Thaler listed DABUS as the inventor.1 The majority dismissed the appeal, holding that under sections-7 and 13 of the Patents Act 1977, an inventor must necessarily be a person.2 The Act’s entire structure, they reasoned, presupposes human inventors: only persons can hold rights, assign property or be mentioned as inventors under section 13(1). Lord Justice Beach dissented on the procedural question, taking the view that section 13(2) required only an honest statement of belief about inventorship and that Thaler had complied with that requirement, though even he conceded that DABUS was not an “inventor” in the statutory sense.
The Federal Court of Australia, by contrast, decided in Thaler’s favour at first instance. Justice Beach held that the word “inventor” is an agent noun - one whose suffix “or” can describe either a person or a thing that performs the relevant act.3 He reasoned that the Australian Patents Act 1990 contained no express exclusion of non-human inventors and that construing the term narrowly would conflict with the Act’s object clause (section 2A), which aims to promote technological innovation.4 However, the Full Federal Court subsequently reversed this decision, holding that only a natural person can be an inventor for the purposes of the Patents Act, ultimately aligning Australia with the UK position.5
In the United States, the most recent and significant ruling came from the District Of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals in Stephen Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, decided on 18 March 2025.⁶ Thaler sought copyright registration for an image titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”, listing his AI system called the “Creativity Machine”, as sole author. The Copyright Office denied registration on the basis of its longstanding human-authorship requirement, a position upheld by the district court and affirmed by the appellate court. The D.C. Circuit Court conducted a thorough textual analysis of the Copyright Act of 1976, noting that multiple provisions viz. governing copyright duration tied to an author’s life, inheritance of termination interests by widows and children, domicile-based protections and the requirement of a signature for transfers, make sense only if authors are human beings.⁷ Machines, the court observed, have, no domiciles and no signatures. Hence, the court concluded that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of the Copyright Act.
The Indian Context: Stephen L. Thaler v. Union of India and Ors.
Against this global backdrop, Thaler’s litigation arrived in India in early 2026, though in a markedly more procedural register. In Stephen L. Thaler v. Union of India and Ors., decided by Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the Delhi High Court on 9 April 2026, Thaler sought a writ of mandamus, under Article 226, directing the Registrar of Copyrights to decide his copyright application filed in 2022 under diary number 9356/2022-CO/A, which had been pending without any meaningful resolution since March 2022.8
The facts are straightforward. Thaler had filed an application before the Copyright Office seeking registration of the same image (“A Recent Entrance to Paradise”) that had already been denied protection in the United States and elsewhere. In July 2023, the Registrar issued a discrepancy letter, in which the Copyright Office asked Thaler to identify a “natural person” as the author of the artwork, signalling that its initial position was that only a human being could qualify as an author under Indian law.9 Thaler’s counsel responded in detail in August 2023, rejecting that position and maintaining that the work fell within the scope of existing Indian law, specifically, the provision on computer-generated works.10 A hearing was then scheduled for March 2024. Counsel sought a brief adjournment, asking for the matter to be listed two weeks later. No further date was ever communicated. Thaler waited nearly two years before approaching the High Court.
Frustrated by the silence, Thaler approached the High Court. The resolution, when it came, was swift. The government’s counsel informed the court that the Registrar had, coincidentally, issued a fresh hearing notice the very day before the matter was listed. Thaler’s counsel accepted this and submitted that the petition could be disposed of as satisfied. The court agreed, but added a firm direction: given that the application had been pending since 2022, the Registrar was asked to conclude the proceedings preferably within eight weeks of the scheduled hearing date.
The order is two pages long and contains no ruling on the substance of AI authorship. Viewed in isolation, it is simply a court telling an administrative body to stop procrastinating. But its importance lies in what it sets in motion.
The interpretation of the Copyright Act, 1957, which governs intellectual property rights in India, is at the center of the dispute. Although Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act recognizes “computer-generated works”, authorship in situations without human interaction is not specifically addressed.11 Thaler has argued that this provision should work in his favour. As the person who built, owned and operated DABUS, he is “the person who causes the work to be created” within the meaning of the said section and therefore the deemed author under Indian law. The Copyright Office, however, has taken a more conservative stance, objecting on the grounds that the current legislation only recognizes natural persons as authors.
The Delhi High Court’s present order does not engage with these substantive questions and is limited to ensuring that the petitioner’s application is decided within a fixed timeframe. By directing the Copyright Office to conclude proceedings within eight weeks of the scheduled hearing, the Court has sought to balance administrative autonomy with the need for accountability and efficiency. That balance, however modest it may appear on paper, carries a pointed message: India cannot afford to look the other way while the rest of the world grapples with these questions. The case highlights a major ambiguity in copyright law in India. Although machine-assisted creation is recognized by the law, ownership of totally autonomous outputs is not made clear.
What makes the Indian situation distinctive and potentially more open-ended than the outcomes in the U.S. or U.K. is precisely the provision on computer-generated works. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 provides that in the case of a work generated by a computer, “the person who causes the work to be created” shall be deemed the author. This provision has no direct equivalent in the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, whose silence on the subject was one of the reasons American courts found the human-authorship requirement so firmly embedded in the statute’s text. India, by contrast, made a deliberate legislative choice decades ago to extend the concept of authorship to cover at least some forms of non-human creative output, by anchoring authorship in the human who caused the creation, rather than the entity that performed it.
Whether the said section is broad enough to cover a fully autonomous system like DABUS, where the human’s role was to build and activate the machine rather than to direct its creative process, is precisely the question the Copyright Office must now answer. The case highlights that the lack of clear provisions for non-human authorship risks causing ambiguity for inventors and businesses investing in AI-driven innovation and offers a chance for Indian law to develop in line with technological progress. This concern deserves to be taken seriously, especially as India positions itself as a significant player in the global AI economy.
The Policy Stakes
The practical consequences of this debate extend well beyond Dr. Thaler’s specific applications. If AI-generated works receive no copyright protection, they enter the public domain immediately upon creation. That outcome may benefit users and downstream creators but risks disincentivizing investment in the development and deployment of creative AI systems. Conversely, attributing copyright to the AI itself would require recognizing legal personhood that no jurisdiction has yet been prepared to grant.
Conclusion
The Delhi High Court’s April 2026 order in Thaler v. Union of India is a small procedural step, but it opens a large door. When the Registrar of Copyrights decides Thaler’s application and when that decision is inevitably challenged, Indian courts will have to engage with questions that their counterparts in other jurisdictions have been wrestling with for years. The global consensus, for now, is that existing statutes do not accommodate AI authorship without legislative intervention. Whether India chooses to chart a different course or to follow the emerging international orthodoxy, will depend on how our courts read a provision that was written long before anyone imagined a machine that could, by any ordinary understanding of the word, “create”.
Footnotes
1. Stephen Thaler v. Comptroller Gen. of Patents, Trade Marks & Designs, [2021] EWCA Civ (A3/2020/1851) (Sept. 21, 2021).
2. Patents Act 1977, c. 37, §§ 7, 13 (UK).
3. Thaler v. Comm’r of Patents, (2021) 160 I.P.R. 72 (Austl.).
4. Patents Act 1990, No. 83, § 2A (Austl.).
5. Comm’r of Patents v. Thaler, [2022] FCAFC 62 (Austl.).
6. Stephen Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (U.S. Ct. App. D.C. Cir. Mar. 18, 2025). 7. Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. (1976).
7. Stephen L. Thaler v. Union of India and Ors., W.P.(C)-IPD 15/2026 & CM 87/2026 (Del. H.C. Apr. 9, 2026).
8. Delhi HC Sets Deadline for Copyright Office to Register AI Artwork, Bus. Standard (Apr. 9, 2026), https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/delhi-hc-asks-copyright office-to-decide-ai-artwork-plea-in-8-weeks-126040901211_1.html .
9. Id.
10. Copyright Act, No. 14 of 1957, § 2(d) (India).
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