The Originality Paradox in AI-Generated Works under Copyright Act 1957
The Copyright Office’s order dated 31 August 2026 (Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A) concerning Dr. Stephen L. Thaler’s AI system, DABUS, marks an important development in Indian copyright jurisprudence. The order followed the Delhi High Court’s direction in Stephen Thaler v. Union of India, W.P.(C)-IPD 15/2026, directing the Registrar of Copyrights to reconsider and decide Thaler’s copyright application concerning DABUS. Its significance lies not merely in refusing to recognise AI as an author, but in distinguishing between originality, authorship and ownership as separate statutory questions. Satisfying one does not automatically determine the others.
- Can an AI-Generated Work Be Original?
The first question before the Registrar was whether A Recent Entrance to Paradise satisfied the originality requirement under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957. Since the Act does not define original, the Registrar relied on principles established in University of London Press Ltd. v. University Tutorial Press Ltd. and Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak. These decisions establish that copyright does not require novelty or inventive ingenuity, but independent creation involving a minimal degree of creativity, skill and judgment.
The Registrar did not treat the absence of direct human intervention in the final output as automatically defeating originality. Since the work was not shown to reproduce any identified pre-existing work and possessed independently generated expressive character, it was found to satisfy the required threshold.
The Order therefore recognises that originality and human authorship are separate questions: a work may satisfy the originality requirement even where its immediate expression is generated by an AI system.
- Originality Does Not Automatically Determine Authorship
The next question was who could legally be regarded as the author. Section 2(d)(vi) provides that, in relation to a computer-generated artistic work, the author is “the person who causes the work to be created”.
The Registrar distinguished legal causation from mere mechanical generation. The fact that DABUS produced the final visual expression did not, by itself, make it an author under the statutory definition.
The Order drew persuasive support from Aalmuhammed v. Lee and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, particularly the concepts of the effective cause and the person to whom the work owes its origin. However, the controlling question remained whether a person could, under Section 2(d)(vi), be said to have caused the particular work to be created.
On the facts, Dr. Thaler had developed DABUS, configured its operation, supplied and curated inputs, and initiated the process that produced the artwork. The Registrar found this connection sufficiently proximate to attribute authorship to him.
The decision therefore does not require a human to determine every element of the final output. Instead, it focuses on whether a person has a legally meaningful and work-specific connection with the creation of the particular work.
- The Ownership Problem: Authorship Must Lead to a Legally Sustainable Title
The Order also addressed the difficulty created by identifying DABUS as the author while claiming Dr. Thaler as the owner.
Under Section 17, copyright generally first vests in the author. Sections 18 and 19 govern the assignment and transfer of copyright. Since DABUS has no legal personality and cannot hold, assign or transfer copyright, there was no legally recognised mechanism through which ownership could pass from DABUS to Dr. Thaler.
This distinction is important because copyright registration must provide certainty regarding authorship, ownership and the chain of title. Recognising an AI system as author without a legally valid mechanism for transferring rights could create uncertainty for licensees, assignees and enforcement proceedings.
- What Happens When AI Does Most of the Creative Work?
The Order does not conclusively resolve cases where an AI system makes a substantially greater creative contribution than the human involved. The Registrar confined the decision to the facts before the Office, recognising that the nature and degree of human involvement may differ across systems and individual works.
The central question in future cases is likely to be whether the human claimant can establish a legally meaningful and work-specific connection with the resulting expression.
Significance of DABUS Order
- The greater the AI system’s independent determination of substantive expressive elements, the more difficult human attribution may become.
- Meaningful human conception, selection, configuration or control directed towards the particular work may support attribution.
- The decision does not establish that every AI-generated work will necessarily have a human author.
- AI-generated expression can potentially be accommodated within the existing copyright framework without granting legal personality to the AI system.
- Recognition of AI authorship or creation of a sui generis regime for autonomous outputs would require legislative intervention, rather than administrative expansion of existing statutory language.
The real significance of the DABUS Order lies in its rejection of a false binary: AI need not be treated as an author merely because it generates the expression, but human authorship cannot be assumed merely because a human owns the technology. The decisive question remains the legally attributable human contribution to the creation of the particular work.
