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Artist Challenges Copyright Office Refusal to Register Award-Winning AI-Assisted Work
Copyright law has long struggled to keep pace with advances in technology, and the debate around the copyrightability of AI-assisted works is no exception. At issue is the human authorship requirement: the principle that a work must have a human author to be eligible for copyright protection. While the Copyright Office has previously cited this "bedrock requirement of copyright" to reject registrations of a "monkey selfie" (Naruto v. Slater) and a work purportedly authored by "celestial beings and transcribed … by mere mortals" (Urantia Foundation v. Kristen Maaherra), recent decisions have focused on the role of human authorship in the context of artificial intelligence (AI).
The Office first tackled the registrability of AI-assisted works in its Kashtanova decision, canceling a previously issued registration of a graphic novel titled Zarya of the Dawn when it learned that the images in the novel were generated using Midjourney, an AI tool that creates images in response to user prompts. Kashtanova detailed to the Office her "creative, iterative process" for generating the images, including "multiple rounds of composition, selection, arrangement, cropping, and editing for each image in the Work." The Office determined, however, that while Kashtanova's textual authorship and selection, coordination, and arrangement of the novel's written and visual elements were eligible for protection, the images themselves were not the product of human authorship and therefore not copyrightable.
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