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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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The statement mostly cites court decisions in support.

In the Office's view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author”, which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office's registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue.

In its leading case on authorship, the Supreme Court used language excluding non-humans in interpreting Congress's constitutional power to provide “authors” the exclusive right to their “writings”. In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author”. The Court defined an “author” as “he to whom anything owes its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature”. It repeatedly referred to such “authors” as human, describing authors as a class of “persons” and a copyright as “the exclusive right of a man to the production of his own genius or intellect”.

Federal appellate courts have reached a similar conclusion when interpreting the text of the Copyright Act, which provides copyright protection only for “works of authorship”. The Ninth Circuit has held that a book containing words “authored by non-human spiritual beings” can only qualify for copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations”. In another case, it held that a monkey cannot register a copyright in photos it captures with a camera because the Copyright Act refers to an author's “children”, “widow”, “grandchildren”, and “widower”—terms that “all imply humanity and necessarily exclude animals”.

Modern AI systems are so far beyond anything we have seen before that I would treat these court opinions as advisory.

I want this to be the case that makes it to the Supreme Court. Meme magic is real.

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