An appeals court said only humans can author a copyrighted work

The process wall

Stephen Thaler filed a copyright application in 2019 for an image titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, naming his software, the Creativity Machine, as sole author and himself only as owner. The Copyright Office refused registration, and on 18 March 2025 the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed that refusal in Thaler v Perlmutter. The wall in this case was built by the applicant himself: Thaler's own application and later submissions repeatedly stated that the work was created autonomously by artificial intelligence, without any creative contribution from a human actor, which framed the case as a test of authorship by a machine acting alone, not of a person directing one.

What the documents show

The opinion, written by Circuit Judge Millett, holds that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. It reasons from the statute's own architecture rather than from policy: copyright vests immediately in an author who can hold property, lasts for the author's life plus seventy years, passes to a widow or widower and surviving children, and requires a signed instrument to transfer, all provisions that make sense only for a human. The court expressly did not decide whether the Constitution itself requires human authorship, and it did not reach Thaler's separate argument that he was the work's author by virtue of building and operating the machine, because the district court had found that argument waived. A companion source, the Office's own registration guidance, shows the same human-authorship rule already governing ordinary applications two years before this appeal was decided.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism is the statute's use of the word author, which the court reads through provisions tied to a human life span, family and legal capacity, not through a dictionary definition of who originates something. The limitation the opinion draws is narrow on purpose: it resolves only the case Thaler chose to bring, a work claimed as wholly machine-authored, and it says nothing about a maker who supplies prompts, edits output or arranges AI-generated material into a larger work, questions the court says belong to the Copyright Office and Congress.

What survives

What survives is the human-authorship requirement itself, now affirmed by a federal appeals court rather than resting only on Copyright Office practice and a single district court ruling. Editorially, the case reads as a boundary marker, not a bar: it forecloses claiming a model as author, but leaves the harder questions about prompting and editing to the Office's Part 2 report and future litigation.

• Read the opinion's own account of how Thaler described the Creativity Machine on his application.
• Compare the seven statutory provisions the court lists against a work that involves a human directing, not just building, an AI system.
• Check whether a later case raises the waived argument this opinion declined to reach.

The court decided a narrow question narrowly, and by its own account left the wider one, about a human who prompts rather than merely builds a machine, for another day.