Delhi court pushes AI authorship decision

A court in Delhi has now forced India’s Copyright Office to stop sitting on one of the strangest questions in modern copyright law: can a machine be listed as the only author of a painting called “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”? The High Court gave the office eight weeks to decide Stephen Thaler’s application and fixed July 16, 2026, for the next hearing. (indianexpress.com) The applicant is Stephen Thaler, a United States computer scientist who says the image was generated autonomously by his artificial intelligence system DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience. He asked India’s registry to record DABUS as the sole author and himself as the copyright owner. (thehindu.com) This is not a trial about whether the picture is good. It is a paperwork fight over the first line of a copyright form, because copyright systems are built around the idea that every protected work has an “author” attached to it. (hindustantimes.com) India’s law already has a clause for “computer-generated” works, but it does not say the computer is the author. Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act says the author of a computer-generated literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work is “the person who causes the work to be created.” (indiankanoon.org) That wording is why this case is harder than it first looks. Thaler is not asking India to credit the human who arranged for the system to run; he is asking India to treat the system itself as the artist and then give the economic rights to the human owner. (indianexpress.com) The registration rules point in the same human direction. Rule 70 says the application must be signed by an applicant who may be an author or owner of rights, and if the owner applies instead of the author, the filing is supposed to include a no-objection certificate from the author. (indiankanoon.org) That creates an obvious mismatch when the claimed author is software. A machine cannot sign a form, cannot issue a no-objection certificate, and cannot hold legal personality in the ordinary way that people and companies do. (indiankanoon.org) Thaler has been running this argument around the world for years. According to reporting in India, he has approached 16 jurisdictions with the same DABUS artwork claim, trying to get one legal system to say an artificial intelligence system can be the sole author. (indianexpress.com) Most major systems have gone the other way. The United States Copyright Office says human authorship is required for copyright registration, and the United States Supreme Court declined in March 2026 to take Thaler’s appeal after lower courts rejected his claim over DABUS-generated art. (copyright.gov) (hklaw.com) The United Kingdom has a special rule for computer-generated works, but even that rule points back to a human. Its 1988 statute says that for a computer-generated work, the author is the person who made the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work. (legislation.gov.uk) So the Indian case is not really asking whether software can help make art, because copyright offices already deal with that every day. It is asking whether India will cross a different line and say a non-human system can occupy the author slot itself, despite a statute that appears to reserve that role for the person who set the process in motion. (indiankanoon.org) (thehindu.com) If the Copyright Office says no, the fight goes back to the High Court with a clear administrative decision on the record instead of silence. If it says yes, India will instantly become one of the most closely watched test cases in global copyright law, because one registry office will have challenged the human-centered model that courts in the United States and other countries have been reinforcing. (hindustantimes.com) (copyright.gov)