The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a brief urging the Supreme Court of the United States to decline review of a high-profile copyright appeal involving an image created entirely by an artificial intelligence system. The petition in question was filed by computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler, who sought copyright protection for an AI-generated artwork titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, produced by an AI he calls the Creativity Machine.
Thaler’s application to register copyright for the image was previously denied by the U.S. Copyright Office, which rejected the claim on the longstanding basis that only human authors can be recognized under current copyright law. That decision was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which agreed that the Copyright Act assumes authorship by a human being.
In its brief opposing Supreme Court review, the Department of Justice argues that the appeals court correctly applied existing law and that there is no conflict with other federal court decisions that would justify the Supreme Court taking the case. The government stressed that the statute’s language and structure consistently equate authorship with human beings — noting, for example, how copyright duration and other provisions presume human creators.
Thaler contends that denying copyright protection to AI-generated works could undermine the rights of creators using advanced technologies, but the Department of Justice maintained that extending copyright to non-human entities like an AI system would conflict with the Act’s historical and statutory framework. The Supreme Court will now decide whether to grant or deny the petition for review, a decision that could have wide implications for how copyright law applies to AI-generated creative content.
