United States Copyright Office Denies Copyright to Award-Winning Art (Again)
Summary
On September 5, 2023, the Review Board of the United States Copyright Office denied a second request for reconsideration of the refusal to register Théâtre D’opéra Spatial—a work that won a fine art competition—because AI-generated content “remains in substantial form in the final” and does not meet the human authorship requirement. The creator, Jason M. Allen, argued that the AI-generated content was the result of his “creative input,” including hundreds of revisions to his input prompts and further manual processing in image editing software. The Review Board determined that Théâtre D’opéra Spatial contains more than a de minimis amount of AI-generated content that must be disclaimed under its current guidance. Mr. Allen’s prompts, according to the Copyright Office, do not make him the author of the AI-generated image because the AI model “does not treat text prompts as direct instructions” and then determines the “traditional elements of authorship” instead of the user doing so. The Review Board did not decide whether the additional processing done in editing software is copyrightable.
