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The legal battle over artificial intelligence copyright, which has been going on for more than a decade, may have reached its end, with the US Supreme Court refusing to hear a case involving visual art created by artificial intelligence.
The subject of the case is an image created in 2012 by computer scientist Steven Thaler, titled “A Modern Doorway to Heaven,” using an artificial intelligence tool he also created. soil. Thaler applied for the copyright to his visual art in 2018, but the application was ultimately accepted. It was rejected by the US Copyright Office On the basis that creative works must have human authorship to be eligible. A local court later upheld the decision.
Thaler’s legal team argued that because he created the system that produced the artwork, he was in fact its author.
“Other countries, such as China and the United Kingdom, already allow copyright protection for works created by artificial intelligence. But the Copyright Office’s reliance on its own non-statutory requirements has resulted in an improper status of U.S. copyright law inconsistent with this Court’s precedent that copyright law must accommodate technological advances,” the lawsuit alleges.
A Copyright Office spokesperson said: “The Copyright Office believes that the Supreme Court reached the correct conclusion that human authorship is required for copyright.”
In an email to CNET, Thaler said that despite the court’s refusal to hear his appeal, “I see this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat.”
While he’s unsure whether legal action will continue, Thaler says he remains certain that copyright law, as written, is intended to exclude non-human inventors.
“By introducing Dabus into the legal system, I confronted a question that had long been limited to theory: whether invention and creativity should remain linked to humans, or whether independent computational processes can truly generate ideas,” says Thaler.
He has previously taken to court The Copyright Office’s decision would cause a negative impact on the development and use of artificial intelligence by the creative industries in the important early years of the technology’s development.
This AI-designed image was created in 2012 using a tool called DABUS, which was developed by computer scientist Steven Thaler. The artwork is the subject of a copyright battle that the US Supreme Court has refused to hear.
He warns that the Copyright Office’s current rules could create a “perfect storm” of low-quality AI-generated content that will continue to flood the Internet and a wave of lawsuits from humans claiming ownership of work they did not create.
“The law is lagging behind what technology can actually do,” Thaler says. “The court addressed what the law currently allows. It did not address what the technology has actually achieved.”