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> The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Work

> The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection, and that rule is now settled at the highest judicial level available. Misstates the law. Denial of certiorari can happen for many reasons unrelated to the merits and does not settle the issue nationwide.

senaevren 6mo ago
Fair and correct. Cert denial means the Court declined to hear the case, not that it endorsed the lower court's reasoning or settled the question nationally. The DC Circuit ruling stands and the Copyright Office's position is consistent, but that is stable doctrine rather than Supreme Court-settled law. Updated the piece to reflect this distinction accurately.
- sowbug 6mo ago
  Since this is a tech audience... the Supreme Court uses a bounded priority queue. An unbounded queue would risk growing impractically large. There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.
greensoap 6mo ago
Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.
- senaevren 6mo ago
  You are right that no court has yet ruled that a specific set of human contributions to AI-assisted work was sufficient to establish authorship. What exists is the inverse: the Copyright Office has granted partial registrations where human-authored elements were separated from AI-generated elements, as in Zarya of the Dawn, where the human-written text was protected but the Midjourney images were not. The Allen v. Perlmutter case pending in Colorado is the first direct judicial test of whether iterative prompting and editing can constitute authorship. Until that decision, the positive threshold is genuinely unknown. The piece reflects this in the calibration section at the end, though your point is worth adding to the authorship discussion more explicitly.
- KallDrexx 6mo ago
  It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Violence_v._Reid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship. While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
jmyeet 6mo ago
The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position. Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court. Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other circuits have ruled and be guided by their reasoning, generally. The fact that the Supreme Court declined to grant cert actually carries weight.
- greensoap 6mo ago
  the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jongjong 6mo ago
    Logically, I think there's a big difference between code which was produced from a simple generic prompt without other input vs code which was produced from a multiple complex prompts with large existing code as input. When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time. I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.
- senaevren 6mo ago
  Fair point and worth being precise about. Cert denial is not meaningless: it leaves the lower court ruling intact, it signals the Court did not find the issue urgent enough to resolve now, and as you note, other circuits will look at the DC Circuit's reasoning. What it does not do is bind other circuits or establish Supreme Court precedent. The distinction matters here because if a Ninth Circuit case involving AI-generated code reaches a different conclusion, that circuit split would be live law regardless of the Thaler cert denial.
freejazz 6mo ago
It does settle the law in as far as maintaining the status quo.
DrewADesign 6mo ago
But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.” Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
  - DrewADesign 6mo ago
    Yes, I didn’t imply national precedence. I imagine it would also signal to attorneys appealing cases other circuits that the same challenge will likely yield the same result.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Although this decision is not binding in other circuit courts, this decision still is something that you can bring to a judge in other courts. They are not required to follow this ruling because they are not in that circuit. However, they still will consider what other courts have said and that will be incentive to think hard before they do something different. A judge who does something different is generally expected to write up a reason why they did something different, and that's something that would be given to an appeals court if they do do something different for consideration of why the other court was wrong.
    - DrewADesign 6mo ago
      Yeah, I’ve heard lawyers use decisions in other jurisdictions to give weight to their line of reasoning. The SC saying they aren’t reviewing an appeal might not make that universally binding, but it signals that they don’t categorically reject the lower court’s decision.
matheusmoreira 6mo ago
> meaningful human authorship How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?
- wayeq 6mo ago
  read the article?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- cooper_ganglia 6mo ago
  From the article: > Specifying an objective to the model is not enough. Directing how the work is constructed is what counts.
  - TurdF3rguson 6mo ago
    That's interesting but how is anyone supposed to prove it? They would have to get their hands on your prompts.
    - archargelod 6mo ago
      Leaks, whistleblowers. Some circumstantial evidence will also do if there's enough of it. Like having hallucinated parts of code that do absolutely nothing, and can't be explained as e.g. leftovers from a refactor.
    - swiftcoder 6mo ago
      > They would have to get their hands on your prompts Unless you are running a local model, your prompts are almost certainly logged by your inference provider, and would only be a subpoena away?
  - ClikeX 6mo ago
    That still sounds incredibly vague and open for interpretation. For example, is setting up md files defining how you want things to be written enough?
PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
From TFA: > When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way. Your quoted text is no longer in TFA.
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  c.f. OP’s comments in this thread.
- jibal 6mo ago
  Because the author acted on that comment.
21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it. What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.
- streetfighter64 6mo ago
  Free water but not electricity? I'll just hook up a generator to the shower... These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.
  - sylware 6mo ago
    I wonder how much of linux and *BSD is in the windows kernel.
    - galangalalgol 6mo ago
      Is there really likely to be any? The design is very different isn't it? Ghidra with llm plugins is likely at a place a determined person could find out.
      - sylware 6mo ago
        Do you really think with that massive amount of open code, some would not be injected in windows kernel (or even .net with mono, or even windows userland with wine)? It is easier to hide it: it is closed source, and they are probably using the same hiding tricks than those used to hide coding AI generated code (usually some level of refactoring to adapt to windows data structures).
        streetfighter64 6mo ago
        Seems like way more effort reading the linux code, copying and adapting it to windows, and actively "hiding" it, than just writing code that fits your situation from the get go. In my experience, reading and understanding code takes a lot more time than writing from scratch, so I don't really see what windows developers (assuming they are somewhat competent coders, this assumption may not hold after around 2010 or so) would have to gain by coping from linux.
graemep 6mo ago
It also contradicts everything else I have read about Thaler. AFAIK the ruling was that the AI could not hold copyright. Thaler waived any claim to the the copyright holder himself. The last two bullet points on this page cover this: https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/03/19/thaler-v-perlmutter-d-c-court-of-appeals-confirms-that-a-non-human-machine-cannot-be-an-author-under-the-u-s-copyright-act/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/03/19/thaler-v-perlmutt... The site also explains the qualifications and experience in copyright law of the author of the above - unlike the article here.
WillPostForFood 6mo ago
Furthermore, we shouldn't even be looking to the Supreme Court at all for this. Congress needs to define the laws around AI and copyright. The Supreme Court is likely avoiding cases in the hope that the legislature gets its act together.
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  100%. This is the real fix, we have new situations, we need new laws. Unfortunately Congress is currently broken.

senaevren 6mo ago

Fair and correct. Cert denial means the Court declined to hear the case, not that it endorsed the lower court's reasoning or settled the question nationally. The DC Circuit ruling stands and the Copyright Office's position is consistent, but that is stable doctrine rather than Supreme Court-settled law. Updated the piece to reflect this distinction accurately.

sowbug 6mo ago
Since this is a tech audience... the Supreme Court uses a bounded priority queue. An unbounded queue would risk growing impractically large. There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.

greensoap 6mo ago

Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.

senaevren 6mo ago
You are right that no court has yet ruled that a specific set of human contributions to AI-assisted work was sufficient to establish authorship. What exists is the inverse: the Copyright Office has granted partial registrations where human-authored elements were separated from AI-generated elements, as in Zarya of the Dawn, where the human-written text was protected but the Midjourney images were not. The Allen v. Perlmutter case pending in Colorado is the first direct judicial test of whether iterative prompting and editing can constitute authorship. Until that decision, the positive threshold is genuinely unknown. The piece reflects this in the calibration section at the end, though your point is worth adding to the authorship discussion more explicitly.
KallDrexx 6mo ago
It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Violence_v._Reid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship. While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

jmyeet 6mo ago

The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position. Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court. Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other circuits have ruled and be guided by their reasoning, generally. The fact that the Supreme Court declined to grant cert actually carries weight.

greensoap 6mo ago
the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- jongjong 6mo ago
  Logically, I think there's a big difference between code which was produced from a simple generic prompt without other input vs code which was produced from a multiple complex prompts with large existing code as input. When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time. I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.
senaevren 6mo ago
Fair point and worth being precise about. Cert denial is not meaningless: it leaves the lower court ruling intact, it signals the Court did not find the issue urgent enough to resolve now, and as you note, other circuits will look at the DC Circuit's reasoning. What it does not do is bind other circuits or establish Supreme Court precedent. The distinction matters here because if a Ninth Circuit case involving AI-generated code reaches a different conclusion, that circuit split would be live law regardless of the Thaler cert denial.

freejazz 6mo ago

It does settle the law in as far as maintaining the status quo.

DrewADesign 6mo ago

But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?

semiquaver 6mo ago
The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.” Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
- DrewADesign 6mo ago
  Yes, I didn’t imply national precedence. I imagine it would also signal to attorneys appealing cases other circuits that the same challenge will likely yield the same result.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Although this decision is not binding in other circuit courts, this decision still is something that you can bring to a judge in other courts. They are not required to follow this ruling because they are not in that circuit. However, they still will consider what other courts have said and that will be incentive to think hard before they do something different. A judge who does something different is generally expected to write up a reason why they did something different, and that's something that would be given to an appeals court if they do do something different for consideration of why the other court was wrong.
  - DrewADesign 6mo ago
    Yeah, I’ve heard lawyers use decisions in other jurisdictions to give weight to their line of reasoning. The SC saying they aren’t reviewing an appeal might not make that universally binding, but it signals that they don’t categorically reject the lower court’s decision.

matheusmoreira 6mo ago

> meaningful human authorship How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?

wayeq 6mo ago
read the article?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
cooper_ganglia 6mo ago
From the article: > Specifying an objective to the model is not enough. Directing how the work is constructed is what counts.
- TurdF3rguson 6mo ago
  That's interesting but how is anyone supposed to prove it? They would have to get their hands on your prompts.
  - archargelod 6mo ago
    Leaks, whistleblowers. Some circumstantial evidence will also do if there's enough of it. Like having hallucinated parts of code that do absolutely nothing, and can't be explained as e.g. leftovers from a refactor.
  - swiftcoder 6mo ago
    > They would have to get their hands on your prompts Unless you are running a local model, your prompts are almost certainly logged by your inference provider, and would only be a subpoena away?
- ClikeX 6mo ago
  That still sounds incredibly vague and open for interpretation. For example, is setting up md files defining how you want things to be written enough?

PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago

From TFA: > When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way. Your quoted text is no longer in TFA.

semiquaver 6mo ago
c.f. OP’s comments in this thread.
jibal 6mo ago
Because the author acted on that comment.

21asdffdsa12 6mo ago

Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it. What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.

streetfighter64 6mo ago
Free water but not electricity? I'll just hook up a generator to the shower... These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.
- sylware 6mo ago
  I wonder how much of linux and *BSD is in the windows kernel.
  - galangalalgol 6mo ago
    Is there really likely to be any? The design is very different isn't it? Ghidra with llm plugins is likely at a place a determined person could find out.
    - sylware 6mo ago
      Do you really think with that massive amount of open code, some would not be injected in windows kernel (or even .net with mono, or even windows userland with wine)? It is easier to hide it: it is closed source, and they are probably using the same hiding tricks than those used to hide coding AI generated code (usually some level of refactoring to adapt to windows data structures).
      - streetfighter64 6mo ago
        Seems like way more effort reading the linux code, copying and adapting it to windows, and actively "hiding" it, than just writing code that fits your situation from the get go. In my experience, reading and understanding code takes a lot more time than writing from scratch, so I don't really see what windows developers (assuming they are somewhat competent coders, this assumption may not hold after around 2010 or so) would have to gain by coping from linux.

graemep 6mo ago

It also contradicts everything else I have read about Thaler. AFAIK the ruling was that the AI could not hold copyright. Thaler waived any claim to the the copyright holder himself. The last two bullet points on this page cover this: https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/03/19/thaler-v-perlmutter-d-c-court-of-appeals-confirms-that-a-non-human-machine-cannot-be-an-author-under-the-u-s-copyright-act/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/03/19/thaler-v-perlmutt... The site also explains the qualifications and experience in copyright law of the author of the above - unlike the article here.

WillPostForFood 6mo ago

Furthermore, we shouldn't even be looking to the Supreme Court at all for this. Congress needs to define the laws around AI and copyright. The Supreme Court is likely avoiding cases in the hope that the legislature gets its act together.

semiquaver 6mo ago
100%. This is the real fix, we have new situations, we need new laws. Unfortunately Congress is currently broken.