AI Tool Cannot Be Entered As Author Under Copyright Act: Copyright Office Rejects DABUS's Registration Bid
Artistic work generated By AI system was held original under Section 13, but registration was refused as the applicant persisted in naming the AI, not its creator, as author.
The Copyright Office has rejected an application seeking registration of copyright in an artistic work titled "A Recent Entrance to Paradise" on the ground that it named an artificial intelligence system, DABUS, as the work's author. The Bench held that DABUS is not a natural or juristic person recognised in law and therefore cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, since copyright law looks to the person who conceived, configured and controlled the creative process, the "mastermind" behind the work, and not to the autonomous software tool that carried out the final act of generation.
DABUS, is an acronym for "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience", which is an artificial intelligence system comprising interconnected neural network modules.
At the same time, the Registrar found that the work itself satisfied the threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957, holding that a work is not deprived of originality merely because it was produced through algorithmic or computational processes, so long as its final composition is independently generated and not a predetermined or mechanical reproduction of any pre-existing work. The rejection, therefore, turned not on the creative quality of the output but on the applicant's insistence on naming the tool, rather than its human controller, as the work's legal author.
The order was passed by the Registrar of Copyrights, Prof. (Dr.) Unnat P. Pandit, with Senior Advocate Rajeshwari Hariharan appointed as amicus curiae to assist the Office on the novel questions of statutory interpretation involved.
“DABUS is not a natural or juristic person recognised in law and cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi)…”, it observed.
“DABUS stands on a materially different footing. It has no statutory recognition, no proprietary status, no civil personality, no treaty identity, and no legal capacity independent of its human creator or controller. To permit an autonomous software system to be treated as an author merely because a human being seeks to act for it would invert the doctrine of representation and would, in effect, create a new class of technological juristic persons through administrative interpretation. Such a consequence cannot be read into Section 2(d) (vi) of the Copyright Act, particularly when that provision itself attributes authorship of computer-generated works to “the person who causes the work to be created”, and not to the computer or software system which generates the output”, it noted further.
Dr. Stephen L. Thaler filed an application in May 2022 under Section 45 of the Copyright Act seeking registration of an artistic work described as having been autonomously generated by DABUS.
The application named DABUS as the work's author and Dr. Thaler, its creator and owner, as the applicant claiming ownership. According to the applicant, Dr. Thaler supplied the visual inputs (his own photographs) and curated linguistic material, configured and trained the system, but the final visual composition emerged entirely from DABUS's internal generative process without real-time human intervention or any text prompt.
On examination, the Copyright Office found that DABUS, entered as author, was not a natural or juristic person recognised in law, and issued a discrepancy letter in July 2023 calling upon the applicant to identify a legally competent author. Unsatisfied with the response, the Office issued a hearing notice in April 2026, followed by detailed objections in May 2026 questioning whether authorship could be attributed to a machine, whether the work met the originality threshold absent human aesthetic judgment, and how ownership could vest in Dr. Thaler when the named author lacked legal capacity to transfer rights.
Given the novelty of the questions, the Registrar appointed an amicus curiae in May 2026. Over three hearings between April and June 2026, the applicant was repeatedly offered the opportunity to amend the authorship entry to name Dr. Thaler as author, but declined, insisting that DABUS be recorded as author, with Dr. Thaler at most named conditionally alongside official recognition of DABUS as "generator".
On originality, the Registrar accepted the amicus curiae's submission that the inquiry under Section 13, as explained in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, requires only a minimal degree of independently generated, non-trivial creative expression, and that this is a threshold distinct from the question of authorship; the work's particular arrangement of visual and compositional elements was found to meet this standard. On authorship, the Registrar rejected the applicant's "causal" argument that DABUS, having performed the immediate generative act, was the "operative cause" of the work while Dr. Thaler was merely its "upstream cause." Drawing on the "mastermind" or "effective cause" test from Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884) and Aalmuhammed v. Lee (9th Cir. 2000), and on the structure of Section 2(d) as a whole, which attributes authorship of cinematograph films to producers and of photographs to the person taking them, rather than to intermediate contributors, the Registrar held that Section 2(d)(vi) similarly looks to the person who conceived, configured, supplied inputs to, and initiated the generative process, not the instrument executing it.
On the facts disclosed by the applicant, Dr. Thaler, not DABUS, was found to be the person who "caused" the particular work to be created. The Registrar further held that DABUS, admittedly lacking legal personality, could not be the first owner of copyright under Section 17 nor validly assign rights under Sections 18 and 19, so that the application's claim of DABUS as author and Dr. Thaler as owner was legally unsustainable as pleaded. A Parliamentary reply relied upon by the applicant, stating that existing IP law adequately protects AI-generated works, was held to confirm only that such works are eligible for protection under Section 2(d)(vi) as "computer-generated" works, not that AI systems themselves could be recognised as authors.
The Registrar held that DABUS cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi), that the particulars naming DABUS as author and Dr. Thaler as owner were legally inconsistent and could not be entered in the Register, and that whether legal personhood or authorship should ever be extended to autonomous AI systems is a policy question reserved for Parliament and not to be introduced through administrative reinterpretation.
Cause Title: In the matter of Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A, Applicant: Dr. Stephen L. Thaler, before the Registrar of Copyrights, Copyright Office, New Delhi.
Appearances:
Applicant: Ankit Sahani, Chirag Ahluwalia, Aman Sinha and Goldie Dhama, Advocates, along with Dr. Rayan Abbott.
Amicus Curiae: Rajeshwari Hariharan, Senior Advocate, as amicus curiae.