The constitutional and statutory rule requiring natural human intellectual conception for copyright authorship, denying registration to autonomous AI outputs.
Rooted in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution and codified in Title 17, copyright protection exists to incentivize human creative genius. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the D.C. Circuit reaffirmed that an autonomous artificial intelligence system ('Creativity Machine') cannot be recognized as an author. Outputs generated entirely from text prompts lack human intellectual conception and fall immediately into the public domain.
There is no circuit split: federal courts, the U.S. Copyright Office, and foreign jurisdictions consistently uphold the human authorship requirement. Tensions exist solely on how much subsequent human editing or arrangement is necessary to claim a derivative human copyright.
