Delhi HC tells Copyright Office to decide: Can an AI system claim sole authorship of an artwork?

The system, called Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience or DABUS, is claimed to autonomously generate novel ideas, inventions, and creative works through artificial neural network processes.

After the copyright application remained pending before the Registrar of Copyrights for more than four years, Thaler had moved the High Court seeking a direction to the Registrar to decide his application expeditiously.

In November 2020, the Copyright Office, which functions under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, had granted copyright for an AI-generated artwork titled “Suryast”. However, in that case, the tool used to generate the artwork, RAGHAV AI (where RAGHAV stands for Robust Artificially Intelligent Graphics and Arts Visualiser), was listed as a co-author along with Advocate Ankit Sahni.

Suryast was a picture of a sunset taken by Sahni, which was rendered along the lines of the Dutch master Vincent van Gogh’s 19th century painting The Starry Night using prompts given to the RAGHAV AI painting app.

The Copyright Office had earlier issued a ‘discrepancy letter’ on Thaler’s application, saying that “as per law only natural person can be author of any artistic work”, and requesting him to “provide proper name of author and NOC (no-objection certificate) of the author in favour of applicant”.

Thaler had responded that “owing to the level of autonomy with which DABUS functions and generates original artistic works, it is submitted that DABUS has ‘caused the work to be generated’”, and “it would be misleading to…list any entity other than DABUS as the author of the…work.”

He had also argued that “it would be inappropriate to list Dr Thaler as an author given he did not contribute directly…as an author”. However, “should the Copyright Office believe it necessary given his causal role in the generation of the work, we believe DABUS should then be listed as co-author…”.

The Copyright Office had listed the application for hearing in March 2024, but an adjournment was sought. The hearing is now scheduled for April 27 this year.

Sahni said Thaler has so far approached 16 jurisdictions worldwide seeking DABUS’s copyright over the artwork.

In March 2025, a US court refused his application saying the US Copyright Act requires human authorship. In other countries such as the United Kingdom and Ireland too, authorship is clearly associated with the human persona, or with the person who made the necessary arrangements for a computer-generated work.

In 2019, a Chinese court ruled in favour of the Tencent company’s ownership over content written by its AI-writing assistant Dreamwriter.

In another case in 2023, another court in China held that “as long as the AI generated images can reflect people’s original intellectual investment, they should be recognized as works and protected by the Copyright Law”, but clarified that copyright belongs to the author, who is a “natural person who creates a work” – and “an artificial intelligence model cannot be deemed as an author under China’s copyright law.”