AI & Emerging TechU.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8; 17 U.S.C. § 102(a)

Human Authorship Requirement

/ˈhjuː.mən ˈɔː.θər.ʃɪp/

The constitutional and statutory principle that copyright protection is reserved exclusively for original intellectual conceptions executed by human natural persons.

Operational Jurisprudential Axiom:

“Copyright is an incentive created by humans, for humans, to advance human civilization.”

Canonical Precedent:

Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025)

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Archival Notes:

Excludes autonomous generative outputs produced by machine learning models without substantial direct human expressive execution.