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Comment by budududuroiu | Hacker News Reader

> The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has affirmed a district court ruling that human authorship is a bedrock requirement to register a copyright, and that an artificial intelligence system cannot be deemed the author of a work for copyright purposes

> The court’s decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter,1 on March 18, 2025, supports the position adopted by the United States Copyright Office and is the latest chapter in the long-running saga of an attempt by a computer scientist to challenge that fundamental principle.

I, like many others, believe the only way AI won't immediately get enshittified is by fighting tooth and nail for LLM output to never be copyrightable

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell...

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Thaler v. Perlmutter is an a weird case because Thaler explicitly disclaimed human authorship and tried to register a machine as the author.

Whereas someone trying to copyright LLM output would likely insist that there is human authorship is via the choice of prompts and careful selection of the best LLM output. I am not sure if claims like that have been tested.

The US copyright office has published a statement that they see AI output analogous to a human contracting the work out to a machine. The machine would hold the copyright, but can't, consequently there is none. Which is imho slightly surprising since your argument about choice of prompt and output seems analogous to the argument that lead to photographs being subject to copyright despite being made by a machine.

On the other hand in a way the opinion of the US copyright office doesn't matter, what matters is what the courts decide

It's a fine line that's been drawn, but this ruling says that AI can't own a copyright itself, not that AI output is inherently ineligible for copyright protection or automatically public domain. A human can still own the output from an LLM.

> A human can still own the output from an LLM.

It specifically highlights human authorship, not ownership

>I, like many others, believe the only way AI won't immediately get enshittified is by fighting tooth and nail for LLM output to never be copyrightable

If the person who prompted the AI tool to generate something isn't considered the author (and therefore doesn't deserve copyright), then does that mean they aren't liable for the output of the AI either?

Ie if the AI does something illegal, does the prompter get off scot-free?

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