How did the Indian Copyright Office rule on AI authorship?

In a ruling dated 31 August 2026, the Registrar of Copyrights in India rejected an application filed by Dr. Stephen L. Thaler to register copyright for an AI-generated artistic work titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which identified his AI system, DABUS, as the author.

The key aspects of the Indian Copyright Office's ruling include:

1. AI Lacks Legal Personhood

The Registrar held that DABUS cannot be recognised as an author under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957, because an AI system is neither a natural person nor a juristic person recognised under Indian law.

2. The Artwork Met the Originality Standard

Interestingly, the Registrar ruled that the artwork itself satisfied the limited threshold of originality required under Section 13 of the Act. The Registrar distinguished originality (the creative character of the resulting expression) from authorship (the legal attribution of who created it). Thus, the absence of real-time human intervention during the final computational generation of the image did not, on its own, defeat the work's originality.

3. "Causation" vs. "Last-Step Generation"

Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act defines the author of a computer-generated work as "the person who causes the work to be created". The Registrar interpreted this as a causation-based standard rather than a "last-step generation" standard.

• Because Dr. Thaler conceived, designed, configured, and trained the DABUS system, provided the baseline visual and linguistic inputs, and initiated the generative process, he was the legally recognised person who caused the work to be created and was therefore eligible to be recorded as the statutory author.

4. Broken Chain from Authorship to Ownership

The application identified DABUS as the author and Dr. Thaler as the owner. Under Sections 17 to 19 of the Act, copyright ownership and transfer rely on a continuous statutory chain of title. Since DABUS is not a legal person, it has no capacity to own copyright or execute a valid written assignment to transfer those rights to Dr. Thaler, creating a legally impossible separation. However, if Dr. Thaler had identified himself as the author, he would ordinarily have been legally recognized as the first owner.

5. Legislative Prerogative

The Registrar concluded that any decision to extend legal personhood or authorship rights to autonomous artificial intelligence systems is a policy decision strictly reserved for Parliament and cannot be introduced administratively.

Reason for Rejection

During the proceedings, the Copyright Office gave Dr. Thaler the opportunity to amend his application to identify himself as the author. Because he declined to make this correction and maintained his case exclusively on the premise of AI authorship, the Registrar rejected the application.