[zephen]

> Has this actually been tried?

Yes, Thaler v. Perlmutter.

I'm pretty sure, even though that's recent, that it fully comports with decades old law on patents, as well.

I can't find an older case, but Thaler v. Vidal is a recent patent case.

[zdragnar]

All that case settled is that AI cannot hold a copyright. Humans can still claim copyright if they put their name on a largely AI produced work.

Your original complaint was that humans were saying "I wrote this", and those people are definitely going to be claiming copyright for it in court at some point... In fact, Thaler v. Perlmutter only makes that more likely as AI programs definitely cannot claim copyright themselves.

Hence my confusion. In principle I definitely agree with your original point though- people should produce content to express themselves, rather than becoming an expression of AI.

[zephen]

> All that case settled is that AI cannot hold a copyright.

Not at all. Thaler wasn't asking that the AI hold the copyright. He wanted to hold the copyright of a work _authored_ by a machine.

But a machine cannot be an author, under law. And a machine cannot be an inventor, under law.

The distinction may seem subtle, but patent law and copyright law both make a distinction between the inventor/author, and the holder of the patent/copyright. For example, most software companies require that any patents by employees be assigned to them.

I found the earlier patent case I was thinking of, Beech Aircraft v EDO, but the appellate ruling in Thaler is quite readable.

https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/03/23-523...

> Humans can still claim copyright if they put their name on a largely AI produced work.

That will certainly be a developing area of law, but it will probably have limited applicability, depending on how much creative input the human actually had into the work.

Let's say that someone asks DALL-E to create a picture of a cat juggling chainsaws. They then copyright it. Someone sees the picture, says "Hey, that's cool! Hey, DALL-E! Make me a picture of a cat juggling chainsaws!" and then they happen to get substantially the same image.

The entire purpose of copyright (from an author's perspective) (in the US, where there are no "moral rights") is to be able to sue infringers. Can the first guy sue the second guy?

It seems unlikely he would win, because copyright does not protect ideas, and the idea is all that the first guy supplied to DALL-E.

Maybe the first guy can win simply because the second image was created after DALL-E sucked in the first image in its next go-round of appropriating the entire web. But then that begs the question of what the first image is infringing, doesn't it? If DALL-E settles all authorship litigation and can proceed, then the second image should be as non-infringing as the first.

> Your original complaint was that humans were saying "I wrote this",

No, my original complaint is the too many people don't bother to figure out who wrote what.

> In principle I definitely agree with your original point though- people should produce content to express themselves, rather than becoming an expression of AI.

Wasn't my point.

In any case, here's an interesting take on the current state of affairs from the perspective of patents.

https://www.iplawgroup.com/staking-out-a-claim-for-inventors...