Heather Whitney authored an article for the Technology & Marketing Law Blog discussing a Washington, D.C. district court decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter, which affirmed the Copyright Office's position that "a work generated entirely by an artificial system about human involvement [is not] eligible for copyright," and that U.S. copyright law protects only works of human authorship.
"The Thaler decision is unlikely to have any great impact," Heather wrote. "There aren't many people trying to register works 'autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine' and disclaiming any human authorship at the outset. The much harder question of 'how much human input is necessary to qualify the user of an AI system as the author of a generated work' was not before the court. That said, while not presented with the question of how much human input is enough, the court's dicta arguably suggests that it thinks there issomeamount of human input to a generative AI tool that would render the relevant human an author of the resulting output."
Read the full article.
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