Jenna Munnelly

“ Contrary to Plaintiff’s argument, there is no support in the Act for his assertion that copyright extends to works created solely by machines. For example, Plaintiff is mistaken that because the statutory phrase “works of authorship” is undefined, the Act permits AI-generated works to be registered. See Dkt. 16 at 7–9. Rather, the human authorship requirement is a longstanding requirement of copyright law. The 1909 Copyright Act explicitly provided that only a “person” could “secure copyright for his work.” ”

“ Plaintiff recites the factors the Court considered but ignores that the Court’s treatment of the work made for hire doctrine assumed that the employee in question is a human. See CCNV, 490 U.S. at 751–52. The factors the Court provided in CCNV for evaluating whether an agent is an employee include “the provision of employee benefits” and “the tax treatment of the hired party.” Id. A machine cannot satisfy these elements: it neither receives benefits nor pays taxes.
Moreover, CCNV’s importation of the common-law agency doctrine into the Act’s “employee” determination required a human. ”

“ Human creativity was essential: had the photograph been a “mere mechanical reproduction” that “involve [d] no originality of thought or any novelty in the intellectual operation,” then “copyright [would offer] no protection.” Id. at 59.
Contrary to Plaintiff’s argument, nothing in Sarony requires registration of the Work at issue in this case. Unlike the Work here, which Plaintiff claims was created “autonomously,” Dkt. 13-2 at US_0000001, the human photographer in Sarony made creative choices such as how he arranged the subject and altered the lighting of the scene. ”

“ Congress’s use of personal pronouns to refer to the employee’s relationship with the employer indicates that Congress intended such employees to be human, not machines. [17] The “Creativity Machine” is not a person, is not Plaintiff’s employee, and is not Plaintiff’s agent. The work made for hire doctrine does not apply here. ”

“ Because the Creativity Machine cannot be an agent, it correspondingly cannot be an employee under the work made for hire doctrine. [19]
Much of Plaintiff’s Motion is devoted to policy arguments in favor of copyright protection for AI created works. But policy arguments do not demonstrate that the Office’s decision was arbitrary and capricious under current law. Rather, these arguments simply show that Plaintiff disagrees with the Office’s decision. ”

“ See 17 U.S.C. § 202 (“Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which the work is embodied. Transfer of ownership of any material object, including the copy or phonorecord in which the work is first fixed, does not of itself convey any rights in the copyrighted work embodied in the object.”) . [14] Plaintiff’s invitation to apply physical property doctrines such as accession and first possession to copyright would contravene the statutory scheme and upend the foundations of copyright law. ”

“ The Court held that photographs were copyrightable creation of “authors” because they reflected creative choices by humans. Id. at 57–59. The then-copyright statute protected the creation of “authors” and the Court construed an “author” as “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature” and found that photographs were protected by copyright as “representatives of original intellectual conceptions of [an] author.” ”

“ Plaintiff claimed that because copyright serves as “a financial incentive to generate expressive works,” copyright for machine-generated works would provide economic incentives for developing “creative AIs” capable of generating new expressive material. Dkt. 13-7 at US_0000024–25; see also id. at US_0000024 (arguing that “ [b] oth the U.S. Constitution and principles of good public policy require that the Office permit ‘AI-generated works’ or ‘computer-generated works’ (CGWs) to receive copyright protection”) . ”

“ Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242, 256 (1986) . “When evaluating cross-motions for summary judgement, each motion is reviewed ‘separately on its own merits to determine whether [any] of the parties deserves judgment as a matter of law.” ”

“ Addressing the argument that copyright requires “the requisite ingredient of human creativity,” the court held that “in this case some element of human creativity must have occurred in order for the Book to be copyrightable.” Id. While Plaintiff suggests that the “worldly” nature of the Creativity Machine is sufficient for copyright protection, Dkt. 16 at 19, the record in this case lacks evidence that Work was the result of “human” creativity, Dkt. ”

“ In a letter, the Office of Registration Policy & Practice again explained that the Trade-Mark Cases and Sarony limited copyright law to protecting only the creations of human authors. Id. at US_0000019. ”