US Supreme Court settles it: AI will not get copyright protection

A six-year legal odyssey by a computer scientist from Missouri came to an end on Monday with a short and unequivocal decision: the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear a case about copyright for works created by artificial intelligence. Without comment, without caveats, without hope of review. Works entirely generated by a machine are not subjects of copyright — and now this is not merely the position of one agency, but essentially a principle established at the highest judicial level.

The story began in 2019, when Stephen Thaler filed an application with the U.S. Copyright Office to register an image titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise."

The peculiarity of the application lay in the fact that Thaler did not list himself as the author of the work, but rather an algorithm he created — an artificial intelligence system called Creativity Machine. Thaler himself positioned himself only as the owner of this machine, insisting that authorship should belong to the algorithm, and rights to the work should be transferred to him as the creator of the system under the "work for hire" principle. The Copyright Office rejected the application, pointing to a fundamental requirement: to obtain copyright, a work must be the result of human creativity.

Thaler did not give up. In 2022, the Copyright Office reconsidered his application and came to the same conclusion again — the image did not contain "human authorship," and therefore could not be protected by copyright. The scientist turned to federal court, but lost there as well: the federal district court for the District of Columbia supported the Copyright Office's position, and the appellate court upheld that decision. The Supreme Court was the last resort, which on Monday, March 2, without further explanation, rejected Thaler's petition to review the case.

It is important to understand the context in which this decision is being made. Since Thaler's first application, the generative artificial intelligence industry has undergone explosive growth. Millions of people daily use DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and other tools to create images, texts, music, and video. The question of who owns the rights to these works has shifted from academic to acutely practical. Companies are building business models around generative content, artists are accusing developers of using their work to train models, and lawyers are trying to find where century-old copyright laws apply to fundamentally new technology.

The Supreme Court's decision, for all its terseness, sets important marks. It does not mean that any content created with the use of AI is automatically deprived of legal protection. The U.

S. Copyright Office has already developed a more nuanced approach: if a person makes sufficient creative contribution — formulates a prompt, edits the result, composes elements — then such a work can receive partial protection. The precedent with the graphic novel "Zarya of the Dawn" in 2023 confirmed this: the text and page layout received copyright, but the individual images generated by Midjourney did not.

Thaler's case was fundamentally different: he intentionally excluded a human from the creative process to test whether a machine could become an author itself. The answer turned out to be unambiguous — no.

For the industry, this decision has far-reaching consequences. Startups selling fully automated content generation will not be able to rely on copyright protection for their products. This creates a paradoxical situation: a company can spend millions of dollars training a model, but the result of its work will be in the public domain, available for copying by anyone. On the other hand, it stimulates an approach in which AI acts as a tool in the hands of humans, not as an independent creator — and perhaps such a model of interaction will turn out to be the most productive both for business and for culture.

It is worth noting that the American precedent will inevitably influence legal discussions in other jurisdictions. The European Union, China, Japan, and other countries are still forming their own approaches to regulating generative AI, and the position of the highest judicial authority of the world's largest economy will become a weighty argument in these debates. In Russia, where questions about copyright for AI-generated content have not yet received clear legal formulation, American experience will also be studied closely.

The outcome of Stephen Thaler's six-year struggle turned out to be predictable, but no less significant for it. The Supreme Court did not change the rules of the game — it confirmed that copyright remains a human privilege. Artificial intelligence can create masterpieces, but legally they belong to no one. And until lawmakers decide otherwise, it is the human hand on the keyboard — or at least the human intent behind the prompt — that remains the boundary between a protected work and digital no man's land.