On March 2, the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter (Case No. 25-449), closing the door on Dr. Stephen Thaler’s years-long effort to secure copyright protection for “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”, a visual artwork Thaler states was autonomously created by his DABUS AI software. The cert denial is not a ruling on the merits; it means the Court chose not to take the case. The practical effect is the same: the D.C. Circuit’s affirmance of the Copyright Office’s human authorship requirement stands.
What that means in plain terms: under current US law, works generated autonomously by AI systems without direct human creative input do not qualify for copyright protection. The precise boundary of what counts as sufficient “human creative input” remains unsettled in ongoing cases, but the baseline rule is clear.
Legal analysts writing as recently as March 13 note that any change to US copyright law to accommodate AI authorship would require Congressional action rather than further judicial interpretation. The Supreme Court’s silence is itself a signal: courts are not going to resolve this. Congress would have to.
For companies generating AI content at scale, the cert denial changes nothing about current legal exposure, AI-generated work produced without meaningful human creative direction has no copyright protection today, just as it didn’t yesterday. What it clarifies is the legislative path: if the law is going to change, it changes in Congress, not in a courtroom.