The DC Circuit rejected inventor Stephen Thaler’s appeal to obtain a copyright for an artwork made by his artificial intelligence system, affirming the stance from the US Copyright Office that only human authors qualify for copyright protection.
Bracewell’s Jonathon Hance told Law360 that Thaler’s plan to appeal this ruling will have a hard time overcoming the plain reading of the Copyright Act regarding authors.
“If you were going to take this all the way up to the current Supreme Court, you’ve got a lot of folks on there that are original, plain language constructionists,” Hance said. “I think it’s going to be hard to get a majority of the Supreme Court to find that authors, as used by the framers, would have included machines.”
