Copyright Office rejects AI system DABUS as author under Indian law

Registrar rules AI system cannot be an author under Indian copyright law, but finds DABUS-generated artwork meets the statutory threshold for originality

An application seeking an artificial-intelligence (AI) system be recognised as the author of an artwork has been rejected by the Copyright Office.

 

In its order, the institution has held that an AI system DABUS cannot be treated as an author under Indian copyright law.

 

The order, passed on August 31 by Registrar of Copyrights Unnat P Pandit, relates to United States-based computer scientist Stephen L Thaler’s application for registering the artistic work “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”.

 

Thaler had identified his AI system, Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS), as the author.

 

While rejecting the application in its existing form, the office held that the artwork itself satisfied the statutory threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, but DABUS could not be its legal author.

 

The ruling turns on Section 2(d)(vi), which provides that for a computer-generated artistic work, the author is “the person who causes the work to be created”.

 

The registrar held that the provision attributed authorship to a legally recognised person responsible for bringing the work into existence, rather than to the computer system performing the final computational process.

 

Thaler the legally recognised author 

According to the order, Thaler conceived, created and configured DABUS, supplied photographs used as visual inputs, curated linguistic material, provided descriptions linking the inputs, and initiated the process through which the artwork came into existence.

 

The registrar concluded that Thaler had an immediate and sufficient nexus with the creation of the specific work and was, therefore, the person who “caused” it to be created under Section 2(d)(vi).

 

DABUS, although it performed the final autonomous computational generation, could not displace that statutory attribution.

The office also rejected the argument that DABUS’s autonomous operation made it the author. It held that autonomy in execution was not the same as the conception of a work where the system operated within the architecture, objectives, parameters and training methodology established by a human creator.

 

It further rejected the argument that “person” could cover DABUS, noting that the AI system had no statutory recognition, proprietary status, civil personality or independent legal capacity.

 

Treating it as an author would create a new category of technological juristic persons, which would be a matter for Parliament.

 

Artwork passes originality test 

Significantly, the office did not hold that an AI-generated work was necessarily incapable of copyright protection. It found that “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” satisfied the originality requirement under Section 13

 

The work contained a particular arrangement of visual forms, colours, tonal variations and spatial relationships, with no material showing that the final composition reproduced an identified pre-existing work.

 

The registrar said the Copyright Act required independent creation with a minimum degree of creativity and did not demand novelty, inventiveness or artistic merit. The finding was confined to the material and facts before the registrar and did not cover every form of AI-assisted creation.

 

Ownership claim fails

 

The application faced a problem over ownership. Thaler claimed ownership while retaining DABUS as the author.

 

The registrar held that this could not be reconciled with Sections 17 to 19 of the Copyright Act. Section 17 ordinarily makes the author the first owner, while a different ownership position requires a statutory exception or valid transfer of rights.

 

Since Thaler himself maintained that DABUS was not a legal person capable of holding property or executing an assignment, there was no legally recognised chain through which copyright could pass from DABUS to him. 

Thaler was given an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars and identify himself as the author, but he declined to do so. The registrar said the office could not unilaterally give a different author as substitute after Thaler had expressly rejected that route.

 

The final order records that though the artwork satisfies the originality threshold, DABUS cannot be recognised as its author, and Thaler is the legally recognised person who caused its creation. However, because the application continued to identify DABUS as the author, it was rejected. 

The decision, therefore, stops short of denying copyright protection to AI-generated expression as a category. Instead, it draws the legal line at authorship: Under the present Copyright Act, an autonomous AI system may generate expression, but cannot itself occupy the statutory position of an author. 

Ankit Sahni, counsel for Thaler and partner at Ajay Sahni Associates, said: “If the work is independently generated, is not copied, and crosses the relatively modest threshold of creativity under Indian copyright law, it can still qualify for copyright protection. At the same time, the AI system itself cannot be recognised as the legal author. That status must vest in a person recognised by law who caused the work to be created.” 

Swati Sharma, partner at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, drawing out the distinction between originality and ownership, said: “Originality and authorship, in other words, are treated as separate legal questions under Indian law, not two sides of the same test.”

 

She said the ruling laid out a route to copyright protection for AI-assisted output backed by human curation.