In a landmark ruling on AI authorship, the Registrar of CopyrightDr. Unnat P Pandit has rejected the application for the artwork “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” holding that authorship under the Copyright Act, 1957 must vest in a legally recognised person and that conferring authorship on an autonomous AI system is a policy decision reserved for Parliament.
The Copyright Office emphasised that Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 attributes authorship of a computer-generated work to “the person who causes the work to be created,” and this expression must be read as a composite phrase identifying the legally recognised originator or mastermind of the work, and not the immediate computational mechanism through which the final output is generated. Consequently, an AI system lacking legal personality cannot be entered as author, and the person who conceived, configured and initiated the generative process is the statutory author entitled to first ownership under Section 17.
The Registrar of Copyrights held that the artistic work “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” satisfies the limited threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957, as the final composition was not predetermined and was not shown to reproduce any identified pre-existing work, even though it was generated through the autonomous computational processes of the DABUS AI system.
DABUS cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, because the provision is a self-contained scheme of statutory attribution that identifies the author as “the person who causes the work to be created,” and this expression must be construed as a composite phrase directing attention to the legally recognised originator or mastermind of the work, and not to the immediate computational mechanism that generated the final output, explained the Copyright Office.
The Registrar observed that the work “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” satisfies the limited threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, as the final configuration emerged through DABUS’s processes of association formation, perturbation, monitoring, stabilisation and output generation, and the resulting composition was not predetermined in its final form nor shown to reproduce any identified pre-existing work. However, on the question of authorship under Section 2(d)(vi), the Registrar held that the provision adopts a causation-based standard and not a generation-based or immediate-creation-based standard, and the focus of the provision is upon “the person who causes the work to be created” rather than upon the entity that immediately generates the output.
Applying the “mastermind” or “effective cause” test drawn from Aalmuhammed v. Lee (9th Cir. 2000) and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884), the Registrar observed that copyright law looks to the directing intellect responsible for the work as a whole, rather than the mechanical instrument used for its execution. On the applicant’s own factual account, Dr. Thaler conceived, created, developed, configured, supplied the visual and linguistic inputs, and initiated the process through which the work came into existence, and therefore Dr. Thaler’s role has an immediate nexus with the work that was created.
The Registrar further observed that DABUS is not a natural or juristic person recognised in law, has no statutory recognition, no proprietary status, no civil personality and no legal capacity independent of its human creator, and therefore cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi). The Registrar also rejected the applicant’s reliance on the analogy drawn from Section 2(d)(v) regarding cinematograph films, observing that each clause of Section 2(d) is self-contained and operates within its own field, and the rationale underlying Section 2(d)(v) cannot be transplanted into Section 2(d)(vi).
The PIB statement of 9 February 2024 was held to merely confirm that the existing Copyright Act is broad enough to extend protection to AI-assisted works, and does not support the proposition that AI systems themselves possess legal personality or can be designated as authors. The deity jurisprudence analogy was likewise rejected on the ground that legal personality precedes representation and is not derived from it.
On the question of ownership under Sections 17–19, the Registrar observed that the applicant’s claim of DABUS as author and Dr. Thaler as owner creates a legally impossible separation, as DABUS admittedly lacks the legal capacity to hold, assign or transfer copyright, and no valid statutory route of vesting or transfer has been shown.
Briefly, Dr. Stephen L. Thaler filed an application under Section 45 of the Copyright Act, 1957 read with Rule 70 of the Copyright Rules, 2013, seeking registration of copyright in an artistic work titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”. The applicant declared that the work was first published in 2016 in the USA and that the author of the work was “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience” (DABUS), an artificial intelligence system conceived and developed by Dr. Thaler himself.
Upon examination, the Copyright Office found that although DABUS had been entered in the authorship column, the application did not identify a natural or juristic person recognised in law as the author, and accordingly issued a discrepancy letter. The applicant responded but the Office remained unsatisfied and issued a hearing notice, followed by detailed grounds of objection raising issues under Sections 2(d)(vi), 13 and 17 of the Copyright Act.
Hearings were held and an Amicus Curiae, Ms. Rajeshwari Hariharan, Senior Advocate, was appointed to assist the Registrar on the novel questions of statutory interpretation arising in the matter. During the hearing, the applicant was specifically afforded an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars by identifying Dr. Thaler as author under Section 2(d)(vi), but the applicant declined to amend and maintained that DABUS must continue to be identified as author.
