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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 4
  • Research debt items: 4

Thaler v. Perlmutter

Summary

Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025), affirmed the Copyright Office’s refusal to register “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” an image Dr. Stephen Thaler attributed solely to a generative system he called the Creativity Machine. The D.C. Circuit held that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires eligible works to be authored in the first instance by a human being.

Verified Facts

  • Citation: Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 18, 2025), later reported as 130 F.4th 1039. Appeal from D.D.C. No. 1:22-cv-01564.1
  • Argued September 19, 2024; decided March 18, 2025. Opinion by Circuit Judge Millet, joined by Circuit Judge Wilkins and Senior Circuit Judge Rogers.1
  • Thaler’s application listed the Creativity Machine as author, Thaler as copyright claimant, and described the work as “2-D artwork, Created autonomously by machine.”1
  • The Copyright Office denied registration because a human being did not create the work; the Registration Program and Review Board affirmed on that ground.1
  • The district court granted summary judgment for the Office, holding that “[h]uman authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright,” Thaler v. Perlmutter, 687 F. Supp. 3d 140, 146 (D.D.C. 2023).1
  • The D.C. Circuit affirmed. It held that the Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.1
  • The court did not decide whether the Constitution independently requires human authorship. It treated as waived Thaler’s argument that he was the author by making and using the Creativity Machine, because that argument was not presented to the agency.1
  • The court also rejected reliance on the work-made-for-hire provision as a way to vest authorship in a machine and then transfer it to Thaler on the application record.1
  • The Copyright Office’s March 2023 registration guidance, issued while Thaler’s district-court case was pending, states that when AI determines the expressive elements of its output, that material is not the product of human authorship and is not protected by copyright.2
  • The Office’s January 2025 copyrightability report reiterated that purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable and that prompts alone do not provide sufficient control under current generally available technology.3

Historical Context

U.S. registration practice has long refused works that do not “owe their origin to a human agent,” a line the Office traces through its Compendium editions and through cases such as Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884), Urantia Foundation v. Maaherra, 114 F.3d 955 (9th Cir. 1997), and Naruto v. Slater, 888 F.3d 418 (9th Cir. 2018).12 Thaler presented that doctrine with a generative-AI system rather than a camera, a monkey, or an alleged spiritual author.

The decision is the leading appellate statement that a non-human machine cannot be listed as author under the 1976 Act. Later disputes, including Spyder Games LLC v. Mementum Lab, cite it when challenging copyright claims in AI-generated meme images. Those later cases may involve mixed human and machine contributions that Thaler’s waived-human-author record does not resolve.1

Jurisdiction: U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, reviewing Copyright Office action under the APA. Authority level: binding in the D.C. Circuit; persuasive elsewhere.

The opinion grounds the human-authorship requirement in statutory text and structure, including term-of-protection provisions that measure duration by a human author’s life, rather than in a constitutional holding.1 Because Thaler’s application and administrative appeals insisted the work was generated autonomously without human creative contribution, the court did not decide how much human prompting, selection, or editing would suffice for authorship.1 The Copyright Office’s later report fills that gap as agency analysis: assistive use of AI does not bar protection; human-perceptible expression, creative arrangement, and creative modification may be protected; prompt-only control, on current tools, does not.3

Thaler cites Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. for the incentive theory of copyright, not for a fair-use holding about AI training.1

Relationships

  • CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER cites SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC.
  • CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.
  • CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER related_to CASE-GOOGLE-V-ORACLE.
  • CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER related_to CASE-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM.

Sources

  1. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC: Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).
  2. SRC-USCO-AI-REGISTRATION-GUIDANCE-2023: Copyright Office AI registration guidance (2023).
  3. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025: Copyright Office AI copyrightability report, Part 2 (2025).

Research Debt

  • Add the D.D.C. summary-judgment opinion (687 F. Supp. 3d 140) as a dedicated source record.
  • Confirm Supreme Court certiorari status after the March 18, 2025 judgment and May 20, 2025 mandate.
  • Add the Copyright Office Review Board decision on “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” (Feb. 14, 2022) as a primary administrative source.
  • Document Zarya of the Dawn cancellation (human text, AI images) as a related registration example from the 2023 guidance footnotes.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2025-03-18
  • Last verified: 2026-08-22

  1. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC — D.C. Circuit opinion. Primary authority. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-USCO-AI-REGISTRATION-GUIDANCE-2023 — 88 Fed. Reg. 16190. Agency guidance. ↩↩

  3. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025 — Copyright Office Part 2 report (Jan. 2025). Agency report. ↩↩