IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: India’s copyright registrar rejects AI system as author of computer-generated artwork, (Sep 1, 2026)

By Saurabh Kashyap, B.A., M.A., LL.B., LL.M.

“A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” an AI-generated artwork, satisfied India’s originality requirement for copyright protection, but the researcher who caused its creation, not the AI system, was its statutory author.

The Registrar of Copyrights in India has rejected U.S. artificial intelligence researcher Stephen L. Thaler’s application to register “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” with an AI system identified as the author. In addressing how India’s Copyright Act, 1957 applies to computer-generated works, the registrar reached two distinct conclusions: the artwork possessed sufficient originality for copyright protection, but the Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) could not be its statutory author. Instead, Thaler was the legally recognized person who caused the work to be created. Because he declined an opportunity to amend the application and continued to identify DABUS as the author while claiming ownership himself, the application was rejected (In re “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A (Registrar of Copyrights, India Aug. 31, 2026)).

AI-generated artwork. Thaler applied in India in May 2022 to register “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” as an artistic work. The application stated that the work was first published in the United States in 2016 and identified DABUS as its author and Thaler as the copyright owner.

DABUS is an artificial intelligence system conceived, created, and developed by Thaler. According to the material submitted to the registrar, the system consists of interconnected artificial neural networks capable of forming associations and generating outputs. For the artwork at issue, Thaler supplied photographs he had personally taken as visual inputs, curated thesaurus entries and English sentences as linguistic inputs, and provided brief textual descriptions to establish associations between the materials. Once configured and trained, DABUS generated the final artwork through its internal processes without real-time human intervention or a text prompt.

The copyright registrar questioned whether DABUS could legally qualify as an author and raised additional issues concerning originality and ownership. During the proceedings, Thaler was specifically offered an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars to identify himself as author under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Indian Copyright Act. He declined and maintained that DABUS should be identified as the author.

Originality satisfied. The registrar first considered whether the artwork could satisfy Section 13 of the Copyright Act despite being generated through an autonomous computational process.

Under the Supreme Court of India’s decision in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, (2008) 1 SCC 1, copyright protection does not require novelty, nonobviousness or an inventive idea, but the work must exhibit at least a minimal degree of creativity. Independent creation and absence of copying are necessary, although expression that is entirely trivial or mechanical will not qualify.

The artwork cleared that threshold. It contained a particular arrangement of visual forms, colors, tonal variations, spatial relationships, and compositional elements. Based on the technical explanation before the registrar, its final configuration emerged through DABUS’s processes of association formation, perturbation, monitoring, stabilization, and output generation. The image was not supplied to DABUS in its final form, was not shown to reproduce an identified preexisting work, and was not the predetermined or inevitable result of a simple mechanical command.

Significantly, the registrar treated originality and authorship as separate questions. For computer-generated works, the absence of human intervention during the final computational stage did not by itself eliminate originality. Where a legally recognized person supplied and curated inputs, configured and initiated a nontrivial generative process and thereby caused independently generated expression to come into existence, the resulting work could meet Section 13 even though the person did not manually select every element of the final output. The originality objection was therefore resolved in Thaler’s favor.

Human author required. The more difficult question was authorship. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Indian Copyright Act specifically addresses computer-generated literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works and defines the author as “the person who causes the work to be created.”

The registrar rejected Thaler’s argument that this language required identifying the immediate causal agent responsible for producing the final expression. Thaler characterized himself as an antecedent or “upstream” cause while maintaining that DABUS was the immediate and operative creator because the AI system autonomously generated the artwork’s final form.

Instead, the registrar interpreted Section 2(d)(vi) as a rule allocating legal authorship. The statutory inquiry was not which computer or technological process produced the final pixels, but which legally recognized person was responsible for bringing the particular work into existence. The immediate technological generator and the statutory author therefore need not be the same.

The registrar found persuasive support in U.S. copyright decisions distinguishing execution of a work from legal authorship, including Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9th Cir. 2000), and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884). Those decisions were not treated as controlling Indian law, but their references to an “effective cause” or “mastermind” helped illustrate the distinction between an instrument used to produce a work and the person responsible for its creation.

On Thaler’s own factual account, he satisfied the Indian statutory standard. He conceived and created DABUS, configured its operation, personally supplied the visual inputs, curated the linguistic inputs, supplied descriptions linking the materials, and initiated the process through which this particular artwork came into existence. His involvement therefore had a sufficiently direct connection with the specific work rather than resting merely on ownership of the AI system.

DABUS’s autonomous operation did not change that conclusion. The system did not design its own architecture, formulate its own operational purpose, select its training methodology, or independently supply the materials used to create the artwork. Autonomy in executing the generative process was not equivalent to legal authorship.

No AI personhood. The registrar also rejected the contention that DABUS could be recorded as the author merely to reflect the work’s technological provenance. A company can qualify as a statutory author in circumstances recognized by Indian copyright law because it already possesses juristic personality and can own property, enter contracts, assign rights and institute legal proceedings. DABUS had no comparable legal status.

Thaler ultimately did not maintain that DABUS was a juristic person capable of owning property, assigning copyright or bearing legal obligations. Section 2(d)(vi) did not create a new category of legal personality for AI systems; it attributed authorship of computer-generated works to a person already recognized by law.

The registrar also rejected Thaler’s reliance on a 2024 Indian government statement that the existing intellectual property framework was equipped to protect AI-generated works without creating a separate category of rights. That statement supported the idea that existing copyright law could accommodate AI-generated output, but it did not establish that AI itself could possess legal authorship.

Ownership problem. The application presented an additional inconsistency because it named DABUS as the author but Thaler as the copyright owner. Under Sections 17–19 of the Indian Copyright Act, the author ordinarily is the first owner, subject to statutory exceptions, while copyright assignments must satisfy prescribed requirements.

If DABUS were treated as the author, Thaler therefore needed either a statutory basis for copyright to vest directly in him or a valid transfer from DABUS. He established neither. Ownership of an AI system did not automatically confer copyright in everything it generated, and DABUS admittedly lacked the legal capacity to assign copyright.

The registrar stressed, however, that the ruling did not establish that Thaler was incapable of owning copyright in the artwork. Because he was the person who caused the work to be created under Section 2(d)(vi), identifying him as statutory author would ordinarily make him the first owner under Section 17. The defect instead arose from his continued insistence on legally inconsistent particulars identifying DABUS as the author and himself as owner.

Registration rejected. The registrar could not unilaterally rewrite the application after Thaler declined the opportunity to amend it. His conditional proposal to identify himself as the author while also obtaining official recognition of DABUS as the technological generator did not cure the existing particulars. The registrar nevertheless left open whether Thaler could make a properly formulated future request for a legally neutral reference identifying DABUS solely as the technological system used to generate the work.

The application was therefore rejected because it continued to identify DABUS as the author, not because AI-generated artwork was categorically ineligible for copyright protection. Thaler remained free to pursue any available remedy based on particulars correctly identifying the author and corresponding ownership. Whether autonomous AI should someday receive legal personhood or authorship, the registrar concluded, was a policy determination reserved for India’s Parliament, not one that could be introduced through administrative interpretation.

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