Indian Copyright Office finds AI-generated work original

The Indian Copyright Office has ruled that an AI system cannot be recognised as the author of a work, but that an AI-generated work may qualify for copyright protection if it meets the requirements of originality. The decision concerned Stephen Thaler’s application to register A Recent Entrance to Paradise, an artwork generated by his AI system DABUS, as solely authored by the system. The Copyright Office held that under the Copyright Act, authorship must be attributed to a human person, even where the AI operates autonomously, while finding that the artwork itself showed sufficient independently generated expression to be considered original.