Copyright Office Says AI System DABUS Can't Be Copyright 'Author' Under Indian Law

On 31 August, the Indian Copyright Office rejected an application seeking registration of copyright in an artwork on the ground that its stated author, an artificial intelligence system called DABUS, is not a person recognised in law and therefore cannot be named as an author under the Copyright Act, 1957.

Registrar of Copyrights Prof. (Dr.) Unnat P. Pandit passed the order while considering an application filed by Dr. Stephen L. Thaler for registration of the artistic work titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”. He observed:

"DABUS is not a natural or juristic person recognised in law and cannot be entered as author under Section 2(d)(vi);"

Filed in 2022, the application identified the author as “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience” (DABUS), an artificial intelligence system comprising interconnected neural networks. Thaler was named as the applicant and publisher.

In 2023, the Copyright Office issued a discrepancy letter, noting that authorship under the Act must be attributed to a person recognised in law, whether natural or juristic, and that DABUS did not possess either status.

During the hearing, Thaler was given an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars by naming himself as the author. However, he declined and insisted that DABUS continue to be identified as the author.

Addressing the question of who could be named as the “author”, the Registrar rejected Thaler's case and clarified that Section 2(d)(vi) of the Act does not depend on the mechanism that generated the final output, but on the person who caused the work to be created. He stated:

“One can easily notice from a perusal of section 2(d)(vi) that the focus of the provision is not upon the 'entity that immediately generates the output' but upon 'the person who causes the work to be created'.”

The Registrar also rejected the analogy drawn with corporate authorship of films and held that a producing company qualifies as an author because it is already recognised as a juristic person under law. He observed:

“A producing company recognized under Sections 2(d)(v) and 2(uu) satisfies all these requirements because it is already a juristic person recognized under law... In the case at hand, DABUS is not an already recognized juristic person.”

Further, the Registrar found that based on the facts disclosed by Thaler himself, Thaler, and not DABUS, was the person who caused the work to be created. The order noted that he had conceived, configured and trained the system and personally supplied the visual and linguistic inputs. It said:

“Dr. Thaler's role is not remote but has immediate nexus with the work that was created. Thus, Dr. Thaler is the person who caused this particular work to be created within Section 2(d)(vi), although DABUS performed the immediate computational generation of its final visual form.”

The Registrar also rejected the ownership claim as pleaded, noting that the application named DABUS as the author while identifying Thaler as the owner, without any statutory mechanism through which copyright could pass from a non-legal entity to a human owner. He noted:

“If DABUS is incapable of being a legal person, it cannot hold copyright in the first instance and cannot assign, transfer or otherwise convey that copyright to Dr. Thaler under Sections 18 and 19. In the absence of a valid statutory route by which title moves from the stated author to the claimed owner, the chain of ownership remains legally incomplete.”

Moreover, the order clarified that the broader question of whether artificial intelligence systems should be granted legal personhood or authorship was a policy matter beyond the Copyright Office's remit. It held:

“Whether legal personhood or authorship should ever be extended to autonomous artificial intelligence remains a policy decision strictly reserved for Parliament, and cannot be introduced via administrative reinterpretation.”

Accordingly, the Copyright Office rejected the application. However, it held that Thaler was free to pursue a fresh registration application identifying himself as the author.