Page:Thaler v. Perlmutter, Refusal, First Request for Reconsideration.pdf/1

 March 30,2020

Ryan Abbott Frank Whittle Building 02 AB 05 Guildford, GU27XH United Kingdom


 * Re:A Recent Entrance to Paradise

Dear Mr. Abbott:

This correspondence responds to your September 8, 2019 letter requesting reconsideration of the U.S. Copyright Office’s (the “Office”) refusal to register a copyright claim in the above-titled work. You made this request on behalf of the copyright claimant, Stephen Thaler.

We reviewed A Recent Entrance to Paradise (the “Work”) in light of the points raised in your letter. We affirm our decision to refuse registration for the Work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to be eligible for copyright protection.


 * Discussion

The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship only if the work was created by a human being. This includes any human being that prepares a work on behalf of an organizational author as a work made for hire.

As noted in our original refusal letter, the copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). See also 17 U.S.C. §102(a) & U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 306 (3d ed. 2017).

The Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without sufficient creative input or intervention from a human author. Compendium (Third) § 313.2. As you state in your letter, the Work here was “autonomously generated by an AI.” Letter at 1. You have provided no evidence on sufficient creative input or intervention by a human author in the Work. We conclude, therefore, that the Work lacks the human authorship necessary to sustain a claim in copyright. The various legal and policy arguments put forth in your request for reconsideration are insufficient to convince the Office to abandon its longstanding interpretation of the