Post #612356

2026-03-03 05:05 UTC

I explained it in detail in a comment I put on the root of the thread. In a nutshell, Thaler is declaring "I am not the copyright holder of this artwork, the AI itself is the copyright holder of the artwork. I want to register this artwork's copyright to the AI that produced it." The copyright office - and, subsequently, all the courts he has appealed the case to - have told him "but an AI is not a legal person, so an AI cannot hold copyright to the artwork. And you are declaring that you yourself are not the holder of the copyright, you are quite insistent on that. So this artwork has no copyright holder. That means it's public domain." This is an important distinction. The court isn't ruling that AI art in general is in the public domain. It's ruling that this art is in the public domain because this guy trying to register it is insisting that it was created without any human involvement. Unfortunately a lot of news articles miss this distinction because a headline declaring "AI art ineligible for copyright" draws a ton of clicks. This has been going on for over three years now, at least. Criminy, I just checked. Thaler began jousting this windmill in 2018, that's when he first made this ridiculous application. Years before modern generative AI came onto the scene. The Thaler v. Perlmutter case started in mid-2022. He is a very persistent loon.

Replies (1)

@mrmaplebar@fedia.io 2026-03-03 07:05

Fair enough, I see what you're saying. I'll go ahead and share the quote from the court's decision for context: We affirm the denial of Dr. Thaler’s copyright application. The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Given that holding, we need not address the Copyright Office’s argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material. Nor do we reach Dr. Thaler’s argument that he is the work’s author by virtue of making and using the Creativity Machine because that argument was waived before the agency. I'm a little bit uncertain based on this summary of the judgement by the Stanford library on copyright and fair use: Dr. Thaler sought review of the Copyright Office’s decision in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The district court affirmed the Copyright Office’s denial, holding that human authorship is a fundamental requirement under the Copyright Act of 1976. The court also rejected Dr. Thaler’s argument that he should own the copyright under the work-made-for-hire doctrine, as the work was never eligible for copyright protection in the first place Why are they saying that "the work was never eligible for copyright in the first place"? Because Thaler claimed that the AI itself made the work? This all feels a bit like Schroedinger's Copyrighted Work to me... the work exists, so who made it? Generative AI fans would have you believe that they are the author and copyright holder, because they wrote a prompt. AI companies might want to argue, like Thaler, that they made the AI, so they are the author and copyright holder. My personal opinion is that the prompt and code are both relatively insignificant in comparison to the training data from which the probabilistic machine learning model is derived. The prompt would do nothing without the model, and OpenAI themselves said they quiet part out loud when they argued in court that the creation of a model such as theirs would be "impossible" to achieve without training off of vast amounts of copyrighted works. "It would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials … Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens," Clearly the training data itself is the most important piece of the system, which makes a lot of sense to those of us who understand how machine learning and "AI" training actually works on a technical level. They've admitted in plain English that their entire product and for-profit business model relies on the use of other people's work as training data. Sounds to me like they have derived considerable value from other people's work without any sort of license or compensation.... By that logic alone, I would argue that the real copyright holders of generative AI works ought to be, at least in part, the people who provided (wittingly or unwittingly) the training data. They are the ones who made this whole social experiment possible, after all. Data is the new code, so I'm not sure why people expect to be able to use it for free in an unrestricted way.

Open ##615512