> The court held that the Copyright Act requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being. Since Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine, a non-human entity, as the sole author, the application was correctly denied. The court did not address the argument that the Constitution requires human authorship, nor did it consider Dr. Thaler’s claim that he is the author by virtue of creating and using the Creativity Machine, as this argument was waived before the agency.
Or in other words: They ruled you can't register copyright with an AI listed as the author on the application. They made no comment on whether a human can be listed as the author if an AI did the work.
An earlier attempt at registering AI creations without AI attribution was rejected by the Copyright Office[1], saying that person in particular needed to make an AI attribution, which they were originally not doing.
In this case, the court is saying AI attribution is not okay, either. There is no way to register copyrights for AI creations.
It's consistent with the Copyright Office's interpretation of copyright law where it holds that it only applies to human creations and doesn't apply to non-human creations, which is what they say AI creations fall under:
> The Copyright Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/thaler-v-perlmutter/