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Introduction
In the matter concerning Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A, the Registrar of Copyrights, New Delhi, on 31st August 2026 rejected an application by Dr. Stephen L. Thaler to register an artistic work titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” in which he sought to record an artificial intelligence system, DABUS, as author while naming himself owner. The Registrar held that the work met the threshold of originality under the Act, but that authorship can be attributed only to a person recognised in law, natural or juristic, and DABUS could not be entered as author merely because it generated the work’s final expression. A Senior Advocate was appointed Amicus Curiae to assist on these novel questions. The order draws a clear line between an AI system’s output being copyrightable and the system itself being an author, leaving AI legal personhood to Parliament.
Facts of the Case
This arose as an original proceeding before the Registrar under Section 45 of the Copyright Act, 1957 read with Rule 70 of the Copyright Rules, 2013. Dr. Thaler filed the application on 3rd May 2022, describing the work as first published in 2016 in the United States, and naming as author “DABUS,” an acronym for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, an AI system he conceived, created and developed. He supplied DABUS with photographs he had personally taken and curated linguistic material; the system then passed through internal stages of training, association formation, perturbation, monitoring, stabilisation and output generation, producing the artwork without further real-time human involvement.
The Office found that DABUS was not shown to be a natural or juristic person as required under Section 2(d)(vi), which defines the author of a computer-generated work as “the person who causes the work to be created.” A discrepancy letter issued on 31st July 2023 called for a legally competent author; the applicant’s response of 25th August 2023 was unsatisfactory. Further objections were raised on 7th May 2026 on authorship, originality and first ownership, followed by hearings on 29th April, 25th May and 24th June 2026. At the final hearing the applicant declined the opportunity to name Dr. Thaler as author, offering instead that he be named author only if DABUS were separately recorded as “generator” – not presented as an unconditional correction. The order was reserved and pronounced on 31st August 2026.
Argument in Favour
The applicant argued that although Dr. Thaler designed and configured DABUS, his role was upstream, while DABUS itself produced the final composition, making it the immediate and operative cause of the work. Section 2(d)(vi), inserted specifically for computer-generated works, should not be read to require direct human aesthetic execution; neither the Copyright Act nor the General Clauses Act, 1897 confines “person” to human beings, and since Section 2(d)(v) read with Section 2(uu) recognises a company as author of a cinematograph film, “person” in Section 2(d)(vi) should equally accommodate DABUS. Reliance was placed on a Rajya Sabha reply of 9th February 2024 by the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, stating the existing framework was adequately equipped to protect AI-generated works without legislative change. On ownership, the applicant contended no assignment from DABUS was needed: relying on the principle underlying Section 17(b), he submitted that as the person at whose instance the work was made, and as DABUS’s owner, he was entitled to first ownership directly.
Argument Against
The Amicus Curiae submitted that Section 2(d)(vi) attributes authorship to an already recognised legal person and does not create a new category of juristic personality; DABUS, having no legal status or capacity to hold property, cannot be entered as author regardless of its computational contribution. The correct test is not which mechanism executed the final output but who conceived and exercised ultimate creative control -the “mastermind” behind the work. On ownership, if DABUS were author it would automatically become first owner under Section 17, yet being incapable of holding or assigning rights, could not transfer copyright to Dr. Thaler under Sections 18 and 19; Section 17(b) applies only to specified commissioned works and creates no general “work-for-hire” rule from merely owning the system, leaving the chain of title incomplete. The Register exists to give the public certainty as to who may lawfully license a work, and the Ministerial reply could not override the plain statutory requirement that authorship vests in a legally recognised person.
Registrar’s Decision
On originality under Section 13, the Registrar held Indian law requires only a minimal degree of creativity and independent, non-copied expression, citing University of London Press Ltd. v. University Tutorial Press Ltd., [1916] 2 Ch 601, for the proposition that originality concerns expression rather than novelty of thought, and Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak, (2008) 1 SCC 1, for holding that copyright demands only a minimal, non-trivial degree of creativity. The artwork was found original, its final composition not shown to reproduce any pre-existing work.
On authorship under Section 2(d)(vi), the Registrar rejected DABUS as author. Drawing persuasive support from Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9th Cir. 2000), and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884) for the “mastermind” or “effective cause” test -authorship belongs to the person who conceives and superintends a work, not the instrument executing it -the Registrar held Section 2(d)(vi) adopts a causation-based, not generation-based, standard. The corporate-film analogy under Section 2(d)(v) was rejected as resting on a distinct legislative policy applicable only to an entity already recognised in law – which DABUS is not. Since Dr. Thaler conceived the system, supplied the inputs and initiated the process, he, not DABUS, was held to be the person who caused the work to be created; the Rajya Sabha reply was held only to confirm that AI-assisted works can qualify for protection under the existing framework, not that an AI system may itself be author.
On ownership under Sections 17 to 19, the Registrar held that naming DABUS as author while claiming ownership for Dr. Thaler created a legally impossible separation, since DABUS could not be first owner under Section 17 nor execute a valid assignment under Sections 18 and 19 -citing Indian Performing Right Society Ltd. v. Eastern India Motion Pictures Association, (1977) 2 SCC 820, for the requirement that any assignment be in writing and signed by the assignor. As the applicant persisted in naming DABUS as author, and the conditional “generator” request was not an unconditional correction, the application as framed could not be registered.
Conclusion
This order offers one of the clearest statements yet on how Indian copyright law approaches AI-assisted works. It affirms that an AI system’s output may well satisfy the modest threshold of originality Indian law applies, so creativity assisted by technology is not, by itself, a barrier to protection. At the same time, it firmly maintains the distinction between the tool used to produce a work and the person legally responsible for it: only a natural or juristic person recognised under law can be an author, and ownership must follow a traceable, statutorily valid path rather than being assumed merely because a person owns the system that produced the work. The Registrar also declined to record DABUS even descriptively as the work’s “generator,” holding that the remarks column cannot confer any status on an AI system -though this does not preclude Dr. Thaler from pursuing whatever remedy the law allows with particulars that correctly identify the author and owner. Whether AI systems should ever be granted legal personhood or authorship, the Registrar made clear, is a matter for Parliament, not administrative interpretation.
