Imagine that your AI creates an image. You simply launch a program, and it generates a result entirely on its own, without you editing or changing anything. Who does such an image belong to? This seemingly simple question occupied the U.S. courts for eight years. And the answer that came on March 2, 2026, is clear: no one! The entire case was reported by Reuters.
A Gateway to Paradise That Opened a Fundamental Question
The story began in 2018, when Stephen Thaler applied to the U.S. Copyright Office for protection of a work titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise (A Recent Entrance to Paradise), which he created using his DABUS AI technology.
The work was nothing extraordinary—it depicted railroad tracks leading into a mysterious gateway surrounded by purple and green pixelated vegetation. However, the work did have one unusual feature. In his application, Thaler did not list himself as the author, but instead listed his AI system. He identified himself only as the owner of the work. The Office rejected the application.
Stephen Thaler refused to give up, however, and the case made its way through the federal courts all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2023, a federal judge delivered the same verdict: human authorship is the cornerstone of intellectual property. The court of appeals told him the same thing in 2025. On March 2, the Supreme Court upheld that decision as well, leaving all previous rulings in effect and declining to consider the case further.
AI Has No Copyright
One of the requirements for copyright protection is that a work must have been created with human involvement. Works created entirely by autonomous artificial intelligence without sufficient human creativity are not eligible for copyright protection in the United States.
This means that if AI generates an image, text, or music entirely on its own, the result belongs to no one and may be used freely.
Where Exactly Is the Line?
Stephen Thaler's case, however, raised an important question: What constitutes “sufficient” human involvement? And does U.S. copyright law take technological innovation into account at all?
If a human is involved in the creative process through prompts, edits, or other creative decisions, copyright protection is still possible under the law. However, the line between “AI helped me” and “AI did it itself” has not yet been precisely defined.
One example is the case of artist Jason Allen, who gave AI more than 600 different instructions and further edited the result in Photoshop, yet the Copyright Office still denied protection for the work because its essential elements were created by AI rather than by Allen himself.
Not Only in America, but in Czechia Too
The struggle over copyright for works created with the help of AI is not illustrated only by distant American cases. The same debate has already reached Czechia as well. The Prague Municipal Court heard a case in which the plaintiff entered a simple command into an AI image generator (Create a visual representation of two parties signing a business contract in a formal setting, such as a conference room or the office of a law firm in Prague. Show only their hands.).
He then sent the resulting image to a Prague law firm, which used it on its website without permission. The plaintiff therefore understandably objected and went to court. But the court's decision disappointed him. It ruled that the plaintiff held no copyright in the image. Czech legislation is based on the same principle: only a human can be the author of a protected work. And because the author in this case was AI, there was nothing more to decide.
The Burden of Proof Lies with the Author
The world of technology is developing faster than legislation can respond to it. And while AI produces higher-quality and more convincing work with each passing month, the law still firmly adheres to the principle that a work cannot receive any protection without demonstrable and essential human intervention. It is therefore important to carefully document how a work was created and, in order to protect it, convincingly prove that AI was merely a tool in the creative process, not the author.
Sources: Reuters, The Guardian, Holland & Knight, Bird & Bird, Mashable
