My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" was published on Nov. 13, 2025. Purchases can be made via Amazon and this Bloomsbury webpage: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ethics-information-and-technology-9781440856662/
Showing posts with label human authorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human authorship. Show all posts
"After having his registration request rejected by the U.S. Copyright Office, the author of an image that combined a photograph with Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night is suing.
PetaPixel reported back in December 2023 that the Copyright Office had rejected Ankit Sahni’s bid to have his artwork officially registered. Now, a report by Copyright Lately reveals that Sahni, via his company Suryast U.S. Enterprises LLC, has filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California challenging the Office’s decision."
Businesses using generative AI should consider a few immediate steps:
Document human creative input. Preserve drafts, edits, source files and records showing who selected, arranged, revised or transformed AI outputs.
Do not assume prompting establishes ownership. Prompt logs may help show process, but they are not a substitute for evidence of human-authored expression.
Be precise in registration strategy. Applicants should disclose AI-generated material where required, identify the human author’s contribution and claim only the human-authored portions.
Revisit contracts and internal policies. Vendor agreements, employee policies and content-development protocols should not assume that all AI-assisted output is fully protectable or exclusively owned in the same way as traditionally authored material.
Bottom Line
The law remains grounded in conventional copyright principles. The Copyright Office’s recent guidance and the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Thaler point in the same direction: copyright protection still turns on human authorship, even when AI is part of the process.
For businesses, the practical implication is not simply that some AI-generated works may be unprotectable. It is that ownership, registration and enforcement may depend on whether the company can later show what a human author actually contributed. In that sense, AI governance is also evidence governance."
"What does a selfie taken by a monkey in 2011 have to do with the videos, photos, and music created using today's artificial intelligence tools?
The answer — that the works in question were not created by humans — could have enormous ramifications for the future of intellectual property rights."
[Kip Currier: I recommend this brief articleLinks to an external site. in Bloomberg Law; the authors do a great job identifying AI, IP, and human and AI-related coding issues right now, such as "vibe coding". They also provide practical strategies for endeavoring to secure copyright protections for code.]
"Copyright protection for software code is being sacrificed, knowingly or not, for the speed and efficiency of AI coding.
This rapid shift in the role of humans from writing code to managing artificial intelligence tools upends traditional copyright protection strategies. Original human-written code is generally copyrightable. But AI-generated code that lacks human authorship is ineligible for copyright protection under US law.
“Vibe coding”—where humans describe a desired software program in natural language and GenAI tools write the code—is pervasive. This isn’t limited to the tech industry. Employees across industries are vibe coding software solutions, which can be valuable to employers.
Developers estimate 42% of code is AI-generated or assisted and the number was expected to increase significantly, according to an October 2025 survey.
The lack of copyright protections is a big deal...
The key is bespoke curation into a creative whole from many options."
"What the courts actually decided is that neither the AI system nor the human who uses it counts as the author of the resulting work. Simply prompting ChatGPT or Claude to produce something isn’t considered the kind of creative activity that copyright law recognizes as authorship. And that creates an unexpected result. If neither the AI nor the human user is the author, then the work has no author at all. In effect, AI-generated images, music, and text become “orphan works”—creations that belong to no one. And that means that anyone can use them."
The man behind the AI-generated image in question reflects on what he calls a "philosophical milestone."
"A legal battle overAI copyrightthat has gone on for more than a decade may have reached its end, with the US Supreme Court declining to hear a case involving AI-generated visual art...
In an email to CNET, Thaler said that although the court declined to hear his appeal, "I see this moment as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat."
While he's unsure if legal action will continue, Thaler says he's still certain that the law on copyright, as written, is intended to exclude nonhuman inventors.
"By bringing DABUS into the legal system, I confronted a question long confined to theory: whether invention and creativity must remain tied to humans or whether autonomous computational processes could genuinely originate ideas," Thaler said."
"TheU.S. Supreme Courtdeclined on Monday to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away a case involving a computer scientist from Missouri who was denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.
Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection because it did not have a human creator."
"On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”"
"In a landmark opinion over the copyrightability of works created by artificial intelligence, a D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that human authorship is required for copyright protection.
As AI technology quickly advances and intertwines with human creations, the unanimousopinionlays down the first precedential marker over who or what is the author of work created solely by artificial intelligence under copyright law.
The case stems from Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who creates and works with artificial intelligence systems and created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.”"
