SCOTUS Confirms Copyrights to Only Humans

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to deny Stephen Thaler’s petition for writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter effectively solidifies – at least for now – the human authorship requirement as the bedrock of American copyright law.

By declining to hear the case, the Court let stand the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s ruling¹ that the Copyright Act protects only works created by humans. Here is a breakdown of the current legal landscape following that denial:

The Human Author Requirement

The core of the dispute was whether Thaler’s Creativity Machine, and AI-system, could be legally recognized as the author of a visual work. The lower courts and the U.S. Copyright Office maintained that:

• Statutory Interpretation: The Copyright Act’s use of terms like “author” and “individual” implies a human actor.
• Constitutional Intent: The purpose of copyright is to provide incentives for human creativity and “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Since an AI machine cannot be “motivated” by legal protections or financial incentives in the way a human is, extending rights to it was deemed unnecessary to fulfill the law’s purpose.

Implications of the Denied Petition

Because the Supreme Court refused to review the case, the following precedents remain in force:

1. Strict Human Nexus: To be copyrightable, a work must have a human creator who exercised creative control or mental conception over the output.
2. No Work-for-Hire Loophole: Thaler argued that he should own the copyright as a work-for-hire created by his AI machine. The courts rejected this, noting that a work-for-hire agreement requires a contract between legal entities, and AI has no legal personhood.
3. The Mechanical Threshold: Works generated autonomously by AI, i.e., where a human merely provides a prompt and the machine does the heavy lifting, that work cannot be copyrightable under existing copyright laws.

Looking Ahead

While this settles the human authorship question for wholly AI-generated works, it leaves a massive gray area for hybrid works. The Copyright Office currently requires applicants to disclose the use of AI and will only grant protection to the specific elements created by a human (e.g., specific arrangements, edits, selections, or “selection, arrangement, and coordination“²).

For more information about copyright law, AI and IP, please contact Yonaxis I.P. Law Group.

Footnotes

1. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). ↩

2. See Satava v. Lowry, 323 F.3d 805, 811 (9th Cir. 2003). ↩