A Portrait of the Artist as a Non-Human

Patent and Copyright in the Age of AI

In a qualified victory for artists and, well, humans, a federal judge has confirmed an earlier opinion that "Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright."

Judge Beryl Howell agreed with a prior judge in Virginia that denied a patent to computer scientist Stephen Thaler for inventions created by his DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) system due to patent law's requirement that an inventor be a human.

"... there is no ambiguity: the Patent Act requires that inventors must be natural persons; that is, human beings" - Judge Leonard Stark

Thaler, by the by, has described DABUS as "natural and sentient," which tells you where that guy is coming from.

In this new finding, Thaler tried to make the case that a piece of "art" titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise (pictured above) was copywriteable to Thaler due to his creation and ownership of the AI model that produced it. He describes the piece as "a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine."

The Judge was not convinced.

“In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the [Federal] Register: No.” - Judge Beryl Howell

This argument is far from settled, however, as a throughline of both of Thaler's cases are his insistence that both the inventions of DABUS and the visuals of Creativity Machine were created autonomously, without human intervention. Without ANY human involvement. We will certainly see companies testing what level of participation from their meat-units will be required to tip the scale from "machine created" to "human created."

But for the time being, if you'd like to use those opening credits from Secret Invasion for your own personal music video, go for it!