The Copyright Office has rejected an application seeking recognition of an artificial intelligence (AI) system as the author of an artwork. In its order, the Copyright Office has held that AI system DABUS cannot be treated as an author under Indian copyright law. The order, passed on August 31 by Registrar of Copyrights Unnat P Pandit, relates to US-based computer scientist Stephen L Thaler’s application for registration of the artistic work “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”.

 

Thaler had identified his AI system, Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS), as the author. While rejecting the application in its existing form, the Copyright Office held that the artwork itself crossed the statutory threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, but DABUS could not be its legal author. The ruling turns on Section 2(d)(vi), which provides that for a computer-generated artistic work, the author is “the person who causes the work to be created.” The Registrar held that the provision attributes authorship to a legally recognised person responsible for bringing the work into existence, rather than to the computer system performing the final computational process.

  

Thaler, the legally recognised author

 According to the order, Thaler conceived, created and configured DABUS, supplied photographs used as visual inputs, curated linguistic material, provided descriptions linking the inputs and initiated the process through which the artwork came into existence. The Registrar concluded that Thaler had an immediate and sufficient nexus with the creation of the specific work and was therefore the person who “caused” it to be created under Section 2(d)(vi).

 

DABUS, although it performed the final autonomous computational generation, could not displace that statutory attribution. The Copyright Office also rejected the argument that DABUS’s autonomous operation made it the author. It held that autonomy in execution is not the same as conception of a work where the system operates within the architecture, objectives, parameters and training methodology established by a human creator.

 

It further rejected the argument that “person” could cover DABUS, noting that the AI system has no statutory recognition, proprietary status, civil personality or independent legal capacity.

 

Treating it as an author would create a new category of technological juristic person, which would be a matter for Parliament.

 

Artwork passes originality test

 

Significantly, the Copyright Office did not hold that an AI-generated work is necessarily incapable of copyright protection. It found that “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” satisfied the originality requirement under Section 13. The work contained a particular arrangement of visual forms, colours, tonal variations and spatial relationships, with no material showing that the final composition reproduced an identified pre-existing work.

 

The Registrar said the Copyright Act requires independent creation with a minimum degree of creativity and does not demand novelty, inventiveness or artistic merit. The finding was confined to the material and facts before the Registrar and did not cover every form of AI-assisted creation.

 

Ownership claim also fails

 

The application also faced a problem over ownership. Thaler claimed ownership while retaining DABUS as the author.

 The Registrar held that this could not be reconciled with Sections 17 to 19 of the Copyright Act. Section 17 ordinarily makes the author the first owner, while a different ownership position requires a statutory exception or valid transfer of rights.

 Since Thaler himself maintained that DABUS was not a legal person capable of holding property or executing an assignment, there was no legally recognised chain through which copyright could pass from DABUS to him.

 Thaler was given an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars and identify himself as the author, but declined. The Registrar said the office could not unilaterally substitute a different author after Thaler had expressly rejected that route.

 The final order records that the artwork satisfies the originality threshold, DABUS cannot be recognised as its author, and Thaler is the legally recognised person who caused its creation. However, because the application continued to identify DABUS as the author, it was rejected.

 

The decision therefore stops short of denying copyright protection to AI-generated expression as a category. Instead, it draws the legal line at authorship: under the present Copyright Act, an autonomous AI system may generate expression, but cannot itself occupy the statutory position of an author.

 

Weighing in on the order, Ankit Sahni, counsel for Stephen Thaler and partner at Ajay Sahni Associates, said, “If the work is independently generated, is not copied and crosses the relatively modest threshold of creativity under Indian copyright law, it can still qualify for copyright protection. At the same time, the AI system itself cannot presently be recognised as the legal author — that status must vest in a person recognised by law who caused the work to be created.”

 

Swati Sharma, partner at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, drawing out the distinction between originality and ownership, said, “Originality and authorship, in other words, are treated as separate legal questions under Indian law, not two sides of the same test.”

 

She added that the ruling lays out a route to copyright protection for AI-assisted output backed by human curation, while shutting the door on claims resting purely on ownership of the AI system.