The Supreme Court won’t settle the AI copyright question, at least not yet. The Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, according to Morgan Lewis’s LawFlash analysis, leaving intact the federal requirement that copyright protection demands human authorship. AI-only generated works don’t qualify.
What that means in practice matters more than the procedural headline. A certiorari denial is not an affirmative ruling. The Supreme Court did not declare that AI cannot hold copyright, it simply declined to take up the case. Lower court reasoning stands. The Copyright Office and federal courts continue to apply the human authorship requirement as the operative standard.
The case stems from inventor Stephen Thaler’s 2018 copyright application for “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” a work created by his DABUS AI system. The Copyright Office rejected the application in 2022. Courts affirmed the rejection. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal closes that particular litigation path, but it doesn’t resolve the broader question of how much human involvement is enough to qualify for protection.
That question is the one compliance teams actually face. Companies using AI tools to generate marketing copy, product images, or design assets need to evaluate whether their workflows involve sufficient human creative direction to establish protectable authorship. Legal analysts draw a parallel to patent law, where natural persons are required as inventors, though that parallel remains legal commentary rather than settled copyright doctrine.
The practical signal: courts aren’t expanding AI copyright protection. Build your IP strategy around human-directed outputs, not autonomous ones.
What certiorari denial means, and doesn’t mean ✓ The human authorship standard remains in effect ✓ Lower court rulings on the Thaler facts stand ✗ The Court did not rule AI cannot hold copyright ✗ Open questions about human-AI collaboration thresholds remain unresolved