Copyright

The highest court in the country just said what everyone already knew — machines aren’t authors. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, the eight-year legal crusade to get copyright protection for art made entirely by AI. By refusing the case, the Court left lower court rulings intact: no human author, no copyright. Period. It’s not a surprise. But the consequences are enormous. The Guy Who Tried to Copyright a Robot’s Painting Stephen Thaler, a Missouri computer scientist, has been fighting this battle since 2018. He filed a copyright application for an image called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” — a surreal piece his AI system DABUS generated without human creative input. ...

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt trading punches on a crumbling rooftop. Donald Trump doing kung fu in a bamboo grove. Will Smith battling a spaghetti monster in what looks like a $200 million blockbuster. None of it is real. All of it was made in minutes by a Chinese AI tool that just sent Hollywood into full meltdown. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 launched last week and immediately became the most controversial AI release since DeepSeek rattled Silicon Valley. The clips it produces are so convincing that Deadpool screenwriter Rhett Reese looked at the Cruise vs. Pitt footage and wrote: “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.” ...