Can AI claim copyright for original work? A question of authorship

Why in the News

India’s Copyright Office has rejected an application seeking copyright registration for an artwork generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) system. The application was filed by American computer scientist Stephen Thaler for a work titled ‘A Recent Entrance to Paradise’, which he said had been generated autonomously by his AI system DABUS. The application named DABUS as the author and Thaler as the owner of the copyright. The order is among the first Indian decisions to address who, if anyone, is the author when an AI system generates a work. The tension it exposes is that the Office found the image original enough to qualify for protection while holding that the entity that produced it cannot be an author.

What is DABUS?

1. The system: DABUS stands for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, an AI system developed by Thaler.
2. The claim made for it: The application asserted that DABUS had generated the artwork autonomously, rather than as an output directed by a human operator.

What did the application claim and what did the Office ask?

1. The filing: Thaler applied in 2022 to register copyright in the artwork.
2. The first question put to him: The Copyright Office asked whether an AI system could legally be recognised as an author under the Copyright Act, 1957.
3. The second question: It also asked who should be treated as the author if the work was indeed generated using AI.
4. The offer he refused: During the proceedings the Office allowed Thaler to amend the application and identify himself as the author. He declined, and continued to insist that DABUS be recognised instead.

How does the Copyright Act, 1957 treat originality?

1. The three separate questions: The Act answers whether a work is original, who its author is, and who owns the copyright, and these are distinct questions rather than one.
2. The protection provision: Section 13 protects original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works.
3. The Act does not define originality: The Copyright Office therefore interprets it from Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak.
4. The judicial test: The Supreme Court in that case held that a work need not be novel or groundbreaking to receive copyright protection. It must show at least a minimum degree of creativity, and it cannot be merely copied or mechanically reproduced.

How does the Act treat authorship and ownership?

1. The authorship provision: Section 2(d)(vi) identifies the author of a computer generated work as “the person who causes the work to be created”.
2. The disputed phrase: The dispute was over whether that phrase refers to the machine producing the output or to the person creating and operating the system.
3. First ownership: Section 17 states that the author is generally the first owner of the copyright.
4. Transfer: Sections 18 and 19 allow copyright to be assigned or transferred through legally recognised agreements.
5. What the structure assumes: The Office noted that these provisions are built around legal persons who can hold rights, transfer them and enforce them.

What did the Copyright Office decide?

1. Originality was satisfied: The Office found that the image generated by the AI was original enough to qualify for copyright protection.
2. Authorship is a legal status: The Act treats authorship as a legal status carrying rights and responsibilities, and an AI system, however sophisticated, does not presently possess such recognition under Indian law.
3. The tool test: To interpret who “causes” a computer generated work to be created, the Office looked to American copyright cases distinguishing between a tool and the person handling it.
4. DABUS as the tool: Although DABUS generated the final image, it did so within a system designed and set in motion by Thaler, so DABUS was treated as the tool and Thaler as the person who legally caused the work to be created.
5. Person means natural or juristic: Where an Act refers to a “person” it usually means a natural person or a juristic person such as a company, an entity capable of owning property and entering contracts. DABUS is not a recognised juristic person.
6. The outcome: Thaler was held to be the person capable of being identified as the statutory author, so the application as filed did not meet the criteria under the Act.

Why was the fallback request also rejected?

1. What was sought: Thaler asked in the alternative that DABUS be recorded as the technological generator of the work.
2. The register cannot confer status: The Office held that the register could not be used to indirectly confer legal status on an AI system.
3. A procedural ground as well: No proper application seeking such an entry had been made.

What has the order left open?

1. A future application can succeed: The order leaves open the possibility of a fresh application that identifies the author in the manner the Copyright Act, 1957 requires.
2. The change of law is reserved: Any broader change in the law would have to come from Parliament.
3. The stated limit on administrative power: The order records that whether legal personhood or authorship should ever be extended to autonomous artificial intelligence “remains a policy decision strictly reserved for Parliament, and cannot be introduced via administrative reinterpretation”.

Challenges to fitting AI generated works into copyright law

1. Human contribution is not measurable at the point of registration: A registrar cannot tell from the output whether a prompt involved creative choice or a single instruction. Eg. The United States Copyright Office refused registration for the AI generated images in the comic ‘Zarya of the Dawn’ while protecting the human written text and arrangement.
   The Fix: Require a disclosure of AI involvement and of the specific human contribution as a mandatory field in the registration application.
2. Training data use is unresolved: Models are trained on protected works without licence, so the lawfulness of the input sits behind every question about the output. Eg. Indian news publishers and a music industry body have sought to intervene in the Delhi High Court proceedings against OpenAI on this ground.
   The Fix: Legislate a statutory text and data mining exception with a transparency obligation on training corpora, so the boundary is set rather than litigated case by case.
3. Ownership defaults to the operator rather than the investor: Treating the person who causes creation as the author leaves the platform, the model developer and the user with competing claims over the same output. Eg. Generative service terms typically assign output rights to the user by contract, which no statute confirms.
   The Fix: Make the allocation of rights in computer generated output a default statutory rule that contracts may vary, rather than leaving it to terms of service alone.
4. Term of protection has no anchor without a human author: Copyright duration runs from the author’s lifetime, which cannot be computed where the generating entity does not die. Eg. The United Kingdom sets a fixed 50 year term for computer generated works precisely to avoid this problem.
   The Fix: Provide a fixed term measured from the date of creation for works with no identifiable human author.
5. Enforcement needs an accountable person: Liability for infringing output, and standing to sue over it, both require someone the law can reach. Eg. An autonomously generated image that reproduces a protected character leaves no party with a stated duty under the current provision.
   The Fix: Attach statutory responsibility for infringing output to the person who deployed the system, mirroring the authorship rule the Office has applied.

Conclusion

The order settles who the author is and leaves untouched what the author did. A work the law accepts as original was produced by a process its named author did not perform, and the statute has no category for that gap. Parliament is the only body that can create one. The point to watch is whether computer generated works are taken up as a legislative question, or whether the issue keeps returning through individual registration applications and appeals against their refusal.

Back2Basics

1. Enactment: The Copyright Act, 1957 came into force in January 1958 and is India’s governing copyright statute.
2. Administration: It is administered through the Copyright Office, which functions under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.
3. Coverage: It protects literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, along with cinematograph films and sound recordings.
4. Registration is optional: Copyright arises on creation of the work, and registration serves as evidence rather than as the source of the right.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2014, GS3, 12 marks] In a globalised world, intellectual property rights assume significance and are a source of litigation. Broadly distinguish between the terms – copyrights, patents and trade secrets.”