Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works

A computer scientist who tried to register an artwork that credited an artificial intelligence system as the sole author lost his appeal on Tuesday.

A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously agreed with the Copyright Office that Stephen Thaler's AI software cannot be granted authorship. Copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being," Judge Patricia Millett wrote in her opinion.

"Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration," Millett wrote.

Thaler had tried to argue that copyright laws were woefully outdated, and laws should change to copyright works made by a generative AI software that he created called the "Creativity Machine." He further claimed that "judicial opinions 'from the Gilded Age' could not settle the question of whether computer-generated works are copyrightable today."

Nowhere in the Copyright Act is "author" defined, Thaler argued, potentially leaving room for today's courts to interpret the statute as permitting wholly AI-generated works to be copyrighted. Throwing the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of "author" at the court, Thaler invited the court to land on a looser interpretation than the Copyright Office was willing to make. If the court did not take his side, Thaler fretted that artists wouldn't be incentivized to use AI to produce creative works, defeating the purpose of copyright laws, he argued.

"Nothing in the Copyright Act requires human creation," Thaler argued in court last January, Reuters reported. "What the Act's language indicates is that when an entity—a natural person, a corporation, a machine—generates a creative work, that entity is the author."

But Millett pushed back, writing that "statutory construction requires more than just finding a sympathetic dictionary definition."

"The text of multiple provisions of the statute indicates that authors must be humans, not machines," the judge said, pointing to numerous examples.

Machines don’t have lives or spouses, judge noted

Perhaps most glaringly, the duration of copyright is typically limited to "the author’s lifespan or to a period that approximates how long a human might live," Millett wrote.

"Of course, machines do not have 'lives,' nor is the length of their operability generally measured in the same terms as a human life," Millett wrote.

Additionally, the judge noted that the statute allows copyrights to be transferred to surviving spouses or children, which machines do not have. It also refers to authors' domiciles and nationalities, which machines do not have. And critically, authors granted copyrights have intentions, whereas "machines lack minds and do not intend anything," Millett wrote.

Accepting Thaler's arguments would mean "problematic questions would arise about a machine’s 'life' and 'death,'" Millett wrote. "And 'machine' would inconsistently mean both an author and a tool used by authors."

Judge mocks Data’s poetry, says machines can’t be authors

In the court's view, the statute considers machines to always be tools, never authors. That includes Thaler's Creativity Machine, Millett wrote. She urged that Thaler's arguments would be best made to Congress or the Copyright Office, not to courts.

However, according to the judge, "the Creativity Machine does not represent the limits of human technical ingenuity when it comes to artificial intelligence," and Congress or the Copyright Office could adapt laws or guidance if "humans at some point might produce creative non-humans capable" of being incentivized to create artworks, as humans are.