Coming Soon
Scheduled to release on November 20, 2026
Can AI Own Art? Thaler v. Perlmutter & The Human Authorship Rule
Can an artificial intelligence hold a copyright?
Can an artificial intelligence hold a copyright? When computer scientist Dr. Stephen Thaler used his autonomous neural network—the 'Creativity Machine'—to generate the visual artwork 'A Recent Entrance to Paradise,' he did not list himself as the creator. Instead, he filed a formal copyright registration naming the AI as the author and asserting ownership under the work-for-hire doctrine. The U.S. Copyright Office rejected the claim, setting off a landmark legal battle that ascended to the Supreme Court. In this episode of reWandt, we examine Thaler v. Perlmutter (No. 25-449). Explore how District Judge Beryl Howell and the D.C. Circuit held that human authorship is a non-negotiable bedrock requirement of copyright law, and why the Supreme Court's March 2026 decision declining review permanently settled the issue across the United States. We break down the vital distinction between AI as an autonomous creator versus an assistive tool, and explore why raw AI prompts belong to the public domain in everyday modern life. Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #AICopyright #HumanAuthorship --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*
Key Takeaways & Core Ideas
- ▪Dr. Stephen Thaler's copyright application naming his autonomous 'Creativity Machine' as the author of 'A Recent Entrance to Paradise.'
- ▪The historical and constitutional doctrine establishing that copyright is strictly designed to incentivize human creators (Sarony, Bleistein, and the Monkey Selfie).
- ▪The federal court holdings and the Supreme Court's March 2, 2026 denial of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter (No. 25-449), cementing human authorship as a bedrock requirement.
- ▪The modern practical rule: purely AI-generated works belong in the public domain, while copyright protection requires meaningful, expressive human creative contributions.
Source Excerpt
"Can an artificial intelligence hold a copyright?"
Related Episodes & Topics
The 2026 AI Legal Showdown: Can AI Train on Copyrighted Work?
The Supreme Court has answered who owns AI output, and federal courts are deciding who pays when platforms enable infringement. But in 2026, the biggest legal question in human history remains completely unresolved: can tech giants train artificial intelligence on the entire creative output of humanity without paying a dime? In this capstone episode of reWandt, we deconstruct the three-pillar legal story defining artificial intelligence in 2026. First, explore how Thaler v. Perlmutter cemented that human authorship is non-negotiable—algorithms cannot hold copyrights, and pure machine outputs belong to the public domain. Second, examine how Cox Communications v. Sony Music establishes secondary liability for platforms that supply the technological pipelines of infringement. Finally, we enter the supreme unresolved battleground heading to the Supreme Court: AI model training and the Fair Use doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 107). From The New York Times v. OpenAI to the Authors Guild, we analyze the titanic collision between Google Books' transformative search doctrine and the Supreme Court's 2023 Warhol ruling against commercial market substitutes. Does an LLM simply 'read like a human,' or is it an industrial copying machine that owes billions in royalties to the creators whose works it ingested? Explore more deep dives at https://reWandt.com #reWandt #AICopyright #FairUse --- *Disclaimer: Assembled by AI from Professor Wandt's lectures and research; this overview may not reflect his exact views or wording.*