The Supreme Court Just Killed AI Copyright — And Nobody Should Be Surprised
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. ...