The Copyright Office of India has rejected American scientist Stephen L. Thaler’s copyright application for an artistic work created by the artificial intelligence (AI) author, Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS).
Thaler’s application did not identify a natural or juristic person, required by the law in India, as the author of the artistic work.
Thaler was asked to identify a natural or juristic person as the author and given an opportunity to amend the application, but he refused to do so. The copyright office appointed senior advocate Rajeshwari Hariharan as amicus curiae on the matter.
Thaler created DABUS, which has interconnected artificial neural network modules that form and stabilise associative patterns representing concepts or ideas.
Thaler said DABUS autonomously generated the artistic work through a sequence of computational processes, and his own contribution was antecedent. Thaler provided the photographs that he took, curated thesaurus entries as well as sentences and brief textual descriptions he gave to DABUS.
However, Thaler submitted that, once DABUS started its configuration, it generated the final artistic work, entitled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, without any real-time human intervention or text prompt.
In the proceedings, Thaler argued about the importance of protecting AI-generated works and resulting industry applications. The copyright office, however, reiterated that the pressing question in the matter is whether DABUS can be entered as an author or not under the law.
Thaler also argued that the law did not require the person as the author of an artistic work to only be a human or natural person.
It was also submitted that naming DABUS as the author was only a factual record in the matter, and naming Thaler would be inaccurate and would not be in the interest of transparency. Thiagarajan Kumararaja v Capital Film Works (2018) was relied on to submit that the term “author” need not be restricted to natural persons.
Hariharan submitted that as in the applicant’s submission, the work constituted as generated by a computer, as an output emerging from Thaler’s inputs.
The copyright law was clear about who could be the author of an artistic work, the one who caused the work to be created, Harihan added. It was also submitted that the copyright laws acknowledge the direct intellect involved in the creation or execution of the artistic work.
The copyright office held that the artistic work satisfied the requirement of originality and only needed a natural or juristic person as an author.
The copyright office observed that the law acknowledged the person who caused the work to be created as the author. Where a computer or AI system generated the final output, it does not discredit the creator, who is the originator, and caused the work to be created.
The copyright office observed that DABUS did not design its own architecture, formula, or its learning.
The application for A Recent Entrance to Paradise was rejected by the copyright office as DABUS could not be recognised as an author. The law recognises the mastermind behind the creation of the work, and not the autonomy of a tool through which the creation is implemented.
Thaler had made similar applications naming AI as the creator/author in other jurisdictions as well. The applications have all been rejected. The US Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia rejected Thaler’s application, noting that “all ‘original works of authorship’ be created in the first instance by a human being”. The UK Supreme Court also rejected a similar application by Thaler.
