On October 9, 2025, Dr. Stephen Thaler and team submitted a petition for writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court asking “[w]hether works outputted by an AI system without a direct,  traditional authorial contribution by a natural person can be copyrighted.” This petition follows a series of denials - first by the Copyright Office, then by the D.C. District Court, and most recently by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals - which found that a purely artificial intelligence ("AI") generated work cannot receive copyright protection, since the AI did not qualify for “traditional human authorship.” If the petition is granted, it could have significant implications for copyright protection for AI-generated works.

The Path to the Supreme Court

Dr. Stephen Thaler developed and owns an AI system (“the Creativity Machine”) that autonomously generated a two-dimensional artwork titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” In applying to register the artwork, Thaler expressly disclosed that the work lacked “traditional human authorship” and that it was “created autonomously by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” He sought registration either on the theory that the work was a “work made for hire” or, alternatively, that copyright should vest in him under property law principles grounded in accession.

The Copyright Office denied registration premised on its longstanding “human authorship requirement.” The district court affirmed, and the D.C. Circuit did the same, holding that the Copyright Act requires authorship “in the first instance” by a human being and concluding that Thaler had waived any argument that he, as the system’s designer/operator, could be the author of the work.

Dr. Thaler's petition now asks the Supreme Court to consider this same question.

The Petition’s Core Arguments

The petition advances four principal grounds for review:

1. Statutory text and structure: The Copyright Act’s operative language protects “original works of authorship” without imposing a human-authorship requirement. The statute itemizes multiple explicit exclusions and limitations, but nowhere excludes nonhuman creation. To the contrary, the Act contemplates nonhuman “authors” in various ways, including through the work-made-for-hire framework, which vests authorship in employers and other non-natural persons; sets bespoke terms of duration for such works; and restricts termination rights for works made for hire.
2. Supreme Court precedent: The petition argues that the decision below conflicts with cases emphasizing that copyright does not police methods of creation and that technology-enabled creativity is not disqualified merely because of mechanization or serendipity. It points to decisions rejecting scrutiny of the creator’s design methods and warning against taste judgments or inquiries into intentionality, as well as cases that historically welcomed technological advances from photography onward.
3. Constitutional purpose: The petition contends that the “human authorship requirement” undermines copyright’s constitutional purpose—to promote the progress of science and the useful arts—by chilling the creation and dissemination of AI-enabled works, a rapidly expanding mode of creative production with significant public benefit.
4. The timeliness of a ruling: The case tees up a purely legal question on a straightforward record: the work was autonomously generated; the applicant transparently said so. The petition emphasizes the urgency of resolving copyright’s application to AI-generated outputs as such tools become ubiquitous across the creative economy.

The Alleged Errors in the Decision Below

The petition identifies several legal errors it contends the court of appeals made in affirming the denial of registration:

1. Reading a human-authorship requirement into the Act. The decision is said to “import absent words into the statute,” effectively rewriting “original works of authorship” to mean “original works of human authorship.” The petition stresses that Congress has repeatedly specified exclusions and special rules in the Act when it wished to, but never enacted a human-only limitation on “authorship.”
2. Treating “author” as inherently human despite the Act’s nonhuman authorship architecture. The petition argues that the court’s opinion misconceives the structure of the Act, which (a) allows non-natural persons to be authors via work-for-hire; (b) adjusts duration precisely to accommodate such authorship; and (c) addresses termination rights in ways that anticipate nonhuman authors. In the petition’s view, these features are inconsistent with the court’s premise that authorship must originate with a human being.
3. Policing creation methods contrary to precedent. The petition contends the decision endorses an impermissible inquiry into the creative method—i.e., how the work was made—rather than focusing on protectable expression and originality. It argues this approach contradicts guidance that copyright does not turn on the creator’s process or the degree of predictability, and that accidental or unintended creative outcomes can still be protected.
4. An untenable and arbitrary “traditional elements of authorship” test. The petition criticizes the Copyright Office’s administrative standard as undefined, inconsistently applied, and never adopted through proper rulemaking. It argues that, if enforced across the board, the Office’s approach would threaten categories like photography, where chance, mechanization, and non-deterministic outcomes often play meaningful roles.
5. Displacing property principles that supply ownership where machines produce outputs. The petition asserts that even if the machine is the immediate producer, longstanding property doctrines—work-for-hire principles and accession rules—assign authorship or ownership to the human owner/user of the machine. It contends the court erred by rejecting these frameworks at the threshold rather than recognizing them as allocating the copyright in an otherwise protectable work.
6. Misalignment with copyright’s constitutional purpose. According to the petition, the decision frustrates the incentive and dissemination goals at the heart of the Clause by imposing a categorical barrier at precisely the moment when AI is poised to increase the creation and distribution of expressive works at scale.
7. Waiver and framing. The petition also takes issue with how the court resolved arguments about whether Thaler, as the system’s creator/operator, could qualify as the author. By treating that position as waived, the petition argues, the court sidestepped the core ownership path the Act and background property law supply when a machine produces the fixation.

Conclusion

If the Court grants review, the resulting decision could define the ground rules for AI-era creativity: whether “author” in the Copyright Act is categorically limited to humans; whether ownership principles like work-for-hire and accession can allocate rights when a machine produces protectable expression; and how to reconcile anti-method-policing precedent with the practical realities of generative systems. The case presents a clear opportunity to align statutory interpretation with copyright’s constitutional purpose at a moment of rapid technological change.