this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday ⁠to take up the issue of whether art generated by artificial intelligence can be copyrighted under U.S. law, turning away ​a case involving a computer ​scientist from Missouri who was ​denied a copyright for a piece of visual art made by his AI system.

Plaintiff Stephen Thaler had appealed to the justices after lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office decision that the AI-crafted visual ⁠art ‌at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ⁠because it did not have a human creator.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering ‌a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors ​to be eligible to receive a copyright. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had urged the Supreme Court not to hear Thaler’s appeal.

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[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

First of all, "Intellectual property[sic]" is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word "property" in that term is biased loaded language.

You don't get to redefine words like "property" or "intellectual property" how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you'll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it's still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That's why people refer to intellectual property.

A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you're in. And they're limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

If I own land in the U.S., I'm still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don't record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor's land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It's a license, not a right.

Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It's the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don't own the copyright until you write it down.

You're just pretty far off base because you don't understand how broad the word "property" is, and you don't seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I'm going by the plain language of the laws. It's the copyright cartel shysters and the judicial system biased in their favor that are making shit up.

[–] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 points 28 minutes ago

Am I out of touch? No, it's the lawyers and judges who are wrong.

Seriously though, these are the same people who made it so that you can own a piece of land, so whatever criticism you want to lob at that foundational role of who gets to say what the law is, it applies equally to all forms of property, a manmade concept to begin with.