Daniel Gala , Yahoo News; Monkey selfie from 15 years ago accidentally sets precedent for AI copyright dispute
"What does a selfie taken by a monkey in 2011 have to do with the videos, photos, and music created using today's artificial intelligence tools?
The answer — that the works in question were not created by humans — could have enormous ramifications for the future of intellectual property rights."
Michael Justus, Carlton Fields, Bloomberg Law; AI Makes Securing Copyright Protection for Software Code Tricky
[Kip Currier: I recommend this brief article in Bloomberg Law; the authors do a great job identifying AI, IP, and human and AI-related coding issues right now, such as "vibe coding". They also provide practical strategies for endeavoring to secure copyright protections for code.]
"Copyright protection for software code is being sacrificed, knowingly or not, for the speed and efficiency of AI coding.
This rapid shift in the role of humans from writing code to managing artificial intelligence tools upends traditional copyright protection strategies. Original human-written code is generally copyrightable. But AI-generated code that lacks human authorship is ineligible for copyright protection under US law.
“Vibe coding”—where humans describe a desired software program in natural language and GenAI tools write the code—is pervasive. This isn’t limited to the tech industry. Employees across industries are vibe coding software solutions, which can be valuable to employers.
Developers estimate 42% of code is AI-generated or assisted and the number was expected to increase significantly, according to an October 2025 survey.
The lack of copyright protections is a big deal...
The key is bespoke curation into a creative whole from many options."
David Gunkel, Northern Public Radio; Perspective: No copyright for AI-generated content
"What the courts actually decided is that neither the AI system nor the human who uses it counts as the author of the resulting work. Simply prompting ChatGPT or Claude to produce something isn’t considered the kind of creative activity that copyright law recognizes as authorship. And that creates an unexpected result. If neither the AI nor the human user is the author, then the work has no author at all. In effect, AI-generated images, music, and text become “orphan works”—creations that belong to no one. And that means that anyone can use them."
Omar Gallaga, CNET ; A Long-Running AI Copyright Question Gets an Answer as Supreme Court Stays Mum
The man behind the AI-generated image in question reflects on what he calls a "philosophical milestone."
"A legal battle over AI copyright that has gone on for more than a decade may have reached its end, with the US Supreme Court declining to hear a case involving AI-generated visual art...
In an email to CNET, Thaler said that although the court declined to hear his appeal, "I see this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat."
While he's unsure if legal action will continue, Thaler says he's still certain that the law on copyright, as written, is intended to exclude nonhuman inventors.
"By bringing DABUS into the legal system, I confronted a question long confined to theory: whether invention and creativity must remain tied to humans or whether autonomous computational processes could genuinely originate ideas," Thaler said."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material
"The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator."
ROSE ESFANDIARI , IP Watchdog; Professors Press SCOTUS to Affirm Copyright Protection for AI-Created Works
"On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”"
MEGAN BUTLER, Courthouse News Service; DC Circuit rules AI-generated work ineligible for copyright
"In a landmark opinion over the copyrightability of works created by artificial intelligence, a D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that human authorship is required for copyright protection.
As AI technology quickly advances and intertwines with human creations, the unanimous opinion lays down the first precedential marker over who or what is the author of work created solely by artificial intelligence under copyright law.
The case stems from Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who creates and works with artificial intelligence systems and created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.”"
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Computer scientist makes case for AI-generated copyrights in US appeal
"Creative works generated entirely by artificial intelligence should be eligible for copyright protection, computer scientist Stephen Thaler told a federal appeals court in Washington this week...
A separate U.S. appeals court rejected Thaler's bid for patents covering AI-generated inventions, in a decision that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review last year. The UK Supreme Court ruled against Thaler in a similar case in December.
Thaler has several related cases still pending in other countries."
TFL ; Copyright Board Upholds Latest Refusal to Register AI Generated Art
"The Office primarily refused to register the work on the basis that it “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.” Specifically, the Office stated that despite Sahni’s claim that the work includes some human creative input, the work is not registrable, as “this human authorship cannot be distinguished or separated from the final work produced by the computer program.”
Following an initial request for reconsideration, in which Sahni argued that “the human authorship requirement does not and cannot mean a work must be created entirely by a human author,” the Copyright Office again concluded that the work could not be registered, as it “is a derivative work that does not contain enough original human authorship to support a registration.” The Office found that “the new aspects of the [SURYAST] work were generated by ‘the RAGHAV app, and not Mr. Sahni – or any other human author,'” making it so that the “derivative authorship was not the result of human creativity or authorship” and therefore, not registrable."
, The New York Times; As Fight Over A.I. Artwork Unfolds, Judge Rejects Copyright Claim
"“Plaintiff can point to no case in which a court has recognized copyright in a work originating with a nonhuman,” Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in her decision on Friday, adding that “we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put A.I. in their toolbox.”
Similar rules about “human authorship” have been used in deciding who owned a monkey’s selfie."
JESUS DIAZ, Fast Company; Copyright Office: Sorry, but you probably can’t protect your AI-generated art
"Well, there’s nothing to see here, folks. You don’t need any of the generative AI tools in our weekly roundup because they will produce stuff you don’t really own. At least that’s what the United States Copyright Office (USCO) says. The federal agency doubled down on its AI doctrine during a recent webinar, labeling anything produced by AI as “unclaimable material.”
In other words, anything that comes out of an AI program can’t be protected under copyright law and will not be accepted even if it’s included in a work created by a human. So those extra trees and mountains you added to your landscape photo with Photoshop Firefly beta? They are not yours, sorry.”
Robert Kasunic of the USCO says, “The Office will refuse to register works entirely generated by AI. Human authorship is a precondition to copyrightability.” But it’s more complicated than that. As Petapixel reports, USCO will register your images if they are modified with AI, but you will have to declare which parts are made using AI, making them “unclaimable, essentially discounting them” from the copyright protection. Kasunic went on to say that USCO believes that using any AI to generate content is akin to giving instructions to a commissioned artist.
How will USCO enforce this policy in a world where generative AI work is practically undetectable? It’s a question that only has one obvious answer: LOL."
Amy Goldsmith, Janet Linn, Tarter Krinsky & Drogin LLP, JD Supra; Using AI to Create a Work – Copyright Protection and Infringement
"Requirements For Past and Current Copyright Applications
Applicants are now required to disclose in their applications any AI-generated content and provide a brief explanation of the human author’s contribution. Any AI-generated content that is more than a tiny portion of the work must be explicitly excluded.
Pending applications must be corrected to conform to the new regulations. Applicants will need to contact the Copyright Office’s Public Information Office should a pending application not adequately disclose any AI-generated content.
For works already registered containing AI-generated material, a supplementary registration will be required describing the original material created by the human author and disclaiming the AI-generated material. Works with sufficient human authorship will be issued a supplementary registration certificate with a disclaimer of the AI-generated content."
BILL DONAHUE, Billboard; Copyright Report Says AI-Assisted Works Can Be Protected – But Only If A Human Was Still In Charge
"A new policy report from the U.S. Copyright Office says that songs and other artistic works created with the assistance of artificial intelligence can sometimes be eligible for copyright registration, but only if the ultimate author remains a human being.
The report, released by the federal agency on Wednesday (March 15), comes amid growing interest in the future role that could be played in the creation of music by so-called generative AI tools — similar to the much-discussed ChatGPT...
Under the rules laid out in the report, the Copyright Office said that anyone submitting such works must disclose which elements were created by AI and which were created by a human. The agency said that any AI-inclusive work that was previously registered without such a disclosure must be updated — and that failure to do so could result in the cancellation of the copyright registration.
Though aimed at providing guidance, Wednesday’s report avoided hard-and-fast rules. It stressed that analyzing copyright protection for AI-assisted works would be “necessarily a case-by-case inquiry,” and that the final outcome would always depend on individual circumstances, including “how the AI tool operates” and “how it was used to create the final work.”
And the report didn’t even touch on a potentially thornier legal question: whether the creators of AI platforms infringe the copyrights of the vast number of earlier works that are used to “train” the platforms to spit out new works."
Chris Sutcliffe, The Drum; Do brands own the copyright on AI-generated ads?
"Where copyright issues come into play is when there is no demonstrable human interaction – a tricky gray area given that a human is required to at least provide the prompts for the AI to begin with."
Min Chen, Artnet News; A Scientist Has Filed Suit Against the U.S. Copyright Office, Arguing His A.I.-Generated Art Should Be Granted Protections
"A computer scientist has filed suit against the U.S. Copyright Office, asking a Washington D.C. federal court to overturn the office’s refusal to grant copyright protection to an artwork created by an A.I. system he built.
The work at the center of the suit is titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which was generated in 2012 by DABUS, an A.I. system developed by Stephen Thaler, the founder of Imagination Engines Incorporated, an advanced artificial neural network technology company.
In November 2018, Thaler applied to register the piece with the copyright office, listing DABUS as the author of the work and stating that it was “created autonomously by machine.” The office refused the application, responding, “We cannot register this work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.”"
Riddhi Setty, Bloomberg Law; Copyright Office Sets Sights on Artificial Intelligence in 2023
"The US Copyright Office over the next year will focus on addressing legal gray areas that surround copyright protections and artificial intelligence, amid increasing concerns that IP policy is lagging behind technology.
“Developments are happening so quickly and so pervasively in so many different fields that I think in a way that is taking up most of the oxygen in the room these days,” Shira Perlmutter, register of copyrights and the office’s director, told Bloomberg Law in an interview."
