A certiorari denial let a human-authorship ruling stand

The picture

On 2 March 2026 the Supreme Court denied the petition for certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 25-449, Stephen Thaler's challenge to the Copyright Office's refusal to register a work he says was generated entirely by his 'Creativity Machine' system without human involvement. The docket's own entry reads simply that the petition was denied, with no opinion attached. The case reached the Court from the D.C. Circuit, which had affirmed that United States copyright protects only works of human creation. A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits: the Court chose not to hear the case, and the appellate decision below remains controlling law in that circuit rather than becoming Supreme Court precedent.

What the documents show

The Court's docket establishes only the fact and date of denial; it gives no reasoning, as is standard for certiorari denials. The Morgan Lewis client alert reads that record for practitioners, stating the denial leaves standing the D.C. Circuit's holding that the Copyright Act 'requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.' The alert is a law firm's own interpretation, not the Court's language, but it agrees no new Supreme Court precedent was created. The two sources agree on outcome and effect; neither supports a claim the Court considered or endorsed the reasoning below, only that an existing appellate rule was left undisturbed.

What it is allowed to decide

This is a record of legal authority, not a previs artifact, but it sets a boundary that governs class 6 registered work: an image, model or sequence with no human creative control over its expressive elements cannot itself hold copyright registration, regardless of the decision class the underlying project occupies. The ruling engages Provenance most directly, since it turns on who or what authored the expressive content, not on how the image looks. It says nothing about Dimensional, Optical, Photometric or Physical authority, and it does not reach whether AI-assisted previs output can be registered when a human exercises meaningful creative control over selection and arrangement.

The disclosure label

A previs artifact built from raw, unedited AI generation would carry a label reading: unregistrable as authored expression under the standing D.C. Circuit rule; class 0-1 inspiration or alignment use only unless a human's creative contribution is separately documented; Provenance not established for the AI-generated content, Dimensional authority not addressed. A production's copyright counsel, not the previs vendor, is the party positioned to assert this label, dated 16 September 2026.

• Did a named human exercise creative control over the expressive elements of this image, or only over the prompt?
• Is the AI-generated content disclosed and separated from any human-authored selection or arrangement in the production record?
• Does downstream use of this artifact assume a copyright status the sources here do not support?

The denial closes no door on AI-assisted previs; it closes the door only on treating unedited machine output as human authorship. This is an editorial reading: the practical consequence for a previs desk is a disclosure habit, not a ban.