Overview
- On March 2, the justices refused to hear Stephen Thaler’s case, keeping existing lower-court decisions and agency determinations in place.
- Thaler sought registration for “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” which he says his AI system DABUS created autonomously; the Copyright Office denied the application in 2022 for lack of human authorship.
- A federal judge in Washington ruled in 2023 that human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright, and the D.C. Circuit affirmed the decision in 2025.
- The Copyright Office’s 2025 guidance states unedited generative outputs, including text‑prompt images, are not protected, though AI‑assisted works may qualify when human creativity predominates.
- The Trump administration urged the Court not to take the case, and Thaler’s related efforts to name DABUS as a patent inventor were previously rejected, with 2024 USPTO guidance confirming inventors must be human.