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The US Supreme Court declines to hear a years-long case on the matter, leaving one famous AI art crusader out in the cold.
Computer scientist Stephen Thaler struck out once again this week after the United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal on the years-long legal battle to secure copyright protections for an AI-generated “artwork.”
Thaler, who has pushed to have an image developed by his AI system “Creativity Machine” copyrighted since 2018, escalated the matter to the Supreme Court last year after lower courts repeatedly upheld the US Copyright Office’s hardline decision to withhold registration.
The agency ruled that the AI-generated image, titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” (2012), was not eligible for registration in 2019 because it didn’t meet the Office’s “human authorship” requirement. Thaler’s 2020 and 2022 appeals to the agency were both rejected, and he filed a lawsuit against Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and the director of the Copyright Office, shortly after the second rejection.
In 2023, the District Court judge presiding over the case argued that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” Undeterred, Thaler invoked the Court of Appeals, which also upheld the Copyright Office’s decision in 2025.
After multiple motions to extend the window of time to file a petition with the Supreme Court, Thaler and his legal counsel challenged the Court of Appeals’ ruling last October. The petition garnered support from multiple professors and researchers who disagreed with the lower courts’ interpretations of the Copyright Office’s decision, arguing that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth.”
It’s worth noting that in 2023, the US Copyright Office produced a statement of policy outlining that some AI-generated artworks could be eligible for copyright protections and will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to discern if the AI elements used were the result of “mechanical reproduction” or of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.”
However, the Supreme Court declined to hear this issue on Monday, March 2 — another blow to Thaler’s fight to update the parameters to qualify for copyright registration as technological advances develop at light speed.
This development hasn’t let the air out of Thaler’s tires, who told CNET that he sees the Supreme Court’s rejection “as a philosophical milestone rather than a defeat.”
“The law is lagging behind what technology can already do,” Thaler told the tech media outlet, saying that this case confronted the theoretical definition of inventions as strictly human-made innovations. “The court addressed what the statute currently allows. It did not address what technology has already achieved.”
