Except he did. He claimed the AI was the author of the work and tried to use the work for hire clause to claim the copyright himself because he owned the machine that created it.
and explained the work had been “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” but that plaintiff sought to claim the copyright of the “computer-generated work” himself “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.”
The work is not copyrightable as it was produced without human input.
The Copyright Office denied the application on the basis that the work “lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim,” noting that copyright law only extends to works created by human beings.
Like a photographer trying to assign copyright to his camera.
As far as I know that photographer tried to do the same thing here - claim copyright himself, not get his camera to claim the copyright. But again, there was no human input into creating the works and owning the camera is not enough for claim copyright.
He claimed the AI was the author of the work and tried to use the work for hire clause to claim the copyright himself because he owned the machine that created it.
That’s two separate steps. First claiming the AI holds the copyright as the author, then that it’s assigned to him because he “hired” the AI. The court said the AI can’t hold the copyright, so step one fails. Step two never comes into play as a result. Since Thaler specifically said that he wasn’t the author, that left the court with no choice but to shrug and say “guess that means there is no author, and therefore no one holds copyright.”
If Thaler had said “I am the author of the work and I used the AI as my tool to create it” that would have been an entirely different matter.
As far as I know that photographer tried to do the same thing here
There was no actual photographer, or if there was it’s a coincidence - I made that up as an analogy.
Except he did. He claimed the AI was the author of the work and tried to use the work for hire clause to claim the copyright himself because he owned the machine that created it.
The work is not copyrightable as it was produced without human input.
As far as I know that photographer tried to do the same thing here - claim copyright himself, not get his camera to claim the copyright. But again, there was no human input into creating the works and owning the camera is not enough for claim copyright.
That’s two separate steps. First claiming the AI holds the copyright as the author, then that it’s assigned to him because he “hired” the AI. The court said the AI can’t hold the copyright, so step one fails. Step two never comes into play as a result. Since Thaler specifically said that he wasn’t the author, that left the court with no choice but to shrug and say “guess that means there is no author, and therefore no one holds copyright.”
If Thaler had said “I am the author of the work and I used the AI as my tool to create it” that would have been an entirely different matter.
There was no actual photographer, or if there was it’s a coincidence - I made that up as an analogy.
Oh, I thought you were referring to this incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Which has similar parallels to this case.