Law14 Sept 2026
Case law › United States
Thaler v. Perlmutter
U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Cir., 18 March 2025, No. 23-5233
US copyright requires a human author: an image created entirely by an AI cannot be registered.
- Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Cir.
- Date
- 18 March 2025
- Reference
- No. 23-5233
- Parties
- Stephen Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter (U.S. Copyright Office)
Key takeaways
Researcher Stephen Thaler wanted to register an image produced entirely by his AI, the “Creativity Machine”, naming the machine itself as the author. The Copyright Office refused, and the federal court of appeals in Washington agreed: US copyright necessarily requires a human author. On 2 March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, so the ruling is now final.
For studios using generative AI, the message is clear. A game asset produced by an AI without any real human contribution may be protected by no one at all, and therefore be free for a competitor to reuse.
The court relied on the very structure of the US Copyright Act: the term of protection is calculated on the author's life, rights pass to heirs, a transfer requires a signature. All rules that only make sense for a human being. The court did not say, however, how much human involvement is enough to protect an AI-assisted creation.
It was the Copyright Office that clarified this point in a January 2025 report: mere text prompts are not enough, but the selection, arrangement and modification of outputs by a human can be protected. In Europe, the result is the same by another route: originality requires the author's own intellectual creation, and therefore a person.
