Just logging back on to mark the end of a particular legal arc. Over the course of this blog I tracked how Copyright law was addressing the rapidly changing capabilities of generative AI models. You can see those posts at The Robot Authors and Return of the Robot Authors.
To summarize, the Copyright Office decided that the law doesn’t provide for copyright protection unless there is a human author. In the time since those posts, the Copyright Office formalized that position with a Statement of Policy (dated March 16, 2023) and a detailed report on copyrightability (dated January 29, 2025).
But there was one hold-out! Dr. Stephen Thaler still had an appeal pending and it was working its way through the courts. His bid was to have the Copyright Office register a copyright for a work that had only his “Creativity Machine” listed as an author. He was turned down by the Copyright Office itself, by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
As of today, however, Dr. Thaler has reached the end of the road. The Supreme Court declined certiorari, which is to say they refused to accept his appeal. That leaves the decision from the Appeals Court in place, and there is no further recourse for him.
I’ve speculated previously about Thaler’s motivations. According to this Wired article from August 31, 2023, the reason for the lawsuits is actually to use IP law as a lever to establish machine personhood, with the goal of gaining acceptance for AI models as sentient constructs. If you look at the Artificial Inventor Project’s webpage, you’ll find that there have been no substantive updates since 2023. So what is he up to now? Based on his LinkedIn it looks like he’s involved with an AI-based cryptocurrency of some sort. Whatever mad scheme he has up his sleeve next, I wish him the best!
Patenting the odd, the impossible, and the unnerving 