# A US appeals court holds that copyright requires a human author, while allowing work made with the assistance of AI

Page: https://flyvolo.ai/en/changes/ev-20250318-author-12
Date: 2025-03-18 · Stage: Constraint
Can this record move a task judgement? yes
Occupation: https://flyvolo.ai/en/careers/author

## Scope

United States. The court held that a machine cannot be the recognised author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being, and that the human-authorship requirement does not prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of AI, so long as the author is the human who created, operated or used it. The work at issue was an image; the ruling concerns authorship, not whether writers use AI to draft.

## Source

- U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (decided 18 March 2025), opinion as published on govinfo (USCOURTS collection) — https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caDC-23-05233/pdf/USCOURTS-caDC-23-05233-0.pdf (primary source)

## What this means

In the US, text a machine wrote on its own is not anyone's property; a novelist's rights rest on what a person wrote.

## What it does not show yet

One country's copyright rule; it does not show how much drafting authors hand to AI.

## How to verify it yourself

Open the opinion in Thaler v. Perlmutter and find "requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being".


More: https://flyvolo.ai/llms.txt