In a recent order dated 31st August 2026, the Registrar of Copyrights, New Delhi, rejected the application of Dr. Stephen L. Thaler (“Applicant / Dr. Thaler”) seeking registration of copyright in the artistic work titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” on the ground that the work’s stated author, an artificial intelligence system called DABUS (“Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”), cannot be recognised as an “author” under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 (“the Act”).
The order is the first reasoned determinations by the Indian Copyright Office on the authorship of AI-generated works, and clarifies that while such works may satisfy the threshold of originality under Section 13 of the Act, legal authorship under Section 2(d)(vi) must still vest in a person recognised in law and not in the machine that generated the final expression.
Factual Background
The Applicant sought registration of the artistic work “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” (“the Work”) first published in 2016 in the USA. The Applicant named DABUS and not himself as the “author” of the Work, while claiming ownership in his own name by virtue of owning the DABUS system.
The Copyright Office raised objections questioning, whether DABUS possessed independent legal personality or competence to be an author. Given the novel issues, the Registrar appointed a Senior Advocate, as Amicus Curiae to assist the Registrar Office. Across three hearings, the Applicant was repeatedly offered the opportunity to amend the application to name Dr. Thaler as author, but he declined and continued to insist that DABUS be recorded as the author.
Key findings
- Originality Can Subsist Even in an AI-Generated Work Applying the “minimal degree of creativity” standard, the Registrar held that the originality inquiry under Section 13 is independent of the authorship inquiry under Section 2(d)(vi). Since the final visual composition of the Work was not predetermined, was not shown to reproduce any pre-existing work, and reflected an identifiable arrangement of colours, forms and spatial elements generated through DABUS’s computational process, the work was held to satisfy the threshold of originality, regardless of the fact that no human consciously selected its final expressive form.
- The “Mastermind”, Not the Machine, Is the Test under Section 2(d)(vi) The Registrar rejected the Applicant’s “causal process” argument that DABUS, having autonomously generated the final output, was the “person who causes the work to be created” within Section 2(d)(vi). The Office held that the statutory phrase directs attention to the person who conceived, configured and controlled the generative process, the “effective cause” or “mastermind” of the work, and not to the immediate mechanism that executed the final computational step. On the Applicant’s own account, Dr. Thaler designed and configured DABUS, personally supplied the visual and linguistic inputs, and initiated the process that led to the work; in essence, therefore, he was the person who “caused the work to be created,” even though DABUS performed the final generative step without real-time human intervention.
- DABUS Cannot Be Recorded as “Author” The Registrar held that Section 2(d) is a self-contained scheme of statutory attribution under which authorship, for every category of work, is allocated to a legally recognised person, natural or juristic. DABUS possesses no statutory recognition, proprietary status, or legal capacity independent of its creator, and the Applicant himself conceded that he did not seek to have DABUS recognised as a juristic person. The analogy sought to be drawn by Applicant from Section 2(d)(v) (producer as author of a cinematograph film, which may be a company) was rejected as misconceived, since that provision merely allocates authorship to an already-existing juristic person and does not create a new category of legal personality for AI systems.
- Authorship and Ownership Particulars Must Be Internally Consistent (Sections 17–19) The application named DABUS as author but Dr. Thaler as owner, without any assignment, and without falling within any exception under Section 17 (e.g., employment). Since DABUS, being incapable of holding or assigning copyright, cannot transfer ownership under Sections 18–19, the Registrar held that the particulars as pleaded created a legally impossible separation between authorship and ownership that could not be entered in the Register. Proposing DABUS as the author of the Work makes it the first owner of the Works and since it is not a recognised juristic person the linking flow of ownership making Applicant the owner is not established. Notably, the Office observed that had Dr. Thaler been correctly identified as the statutory author, Section 17 would ordinarily have made him the first owner as well but the Applicant’s persistence in naming DABUS as author foreclosed that route.
- Registrar Cannot Rewrite the Application The Applicant’s fallback submission, that Dr. Thaler be entered as author with a remark noting that DABUS “generated” the work, was rejected as conditional and improperly formulated. The Registrar held that it cannot suo motu substitute a different author or reconstruct the basis of an application that the Applicant has expressly declined to adopt, doing so would amount to the Registrar making a materially different application on the Applicant’s behalf. The door was left open, however, for a separate, properly formulated request for a legally neutral remark as to technological provenance.
- Legislative, Not Administrative, Prerogative The Registrar underscored that whether legal personhood or authorship should ever be extended to autonomous AI systems is a policy question reserved for Parliament, and cannot be introduced through administrative or interpretative expansion of Section 2(d)(vi).
Key takeaways
The order draws a sharp and important line: originality (Section 13) and authorship (Section 2(d)(vi)) are analytically distinct enquiries. A work generated with AI assistance may well be original, but legal authorship remains tethered to a human or juristic person who conceives, configures and directs the generative process, the “mastermind,” rather than the tool or model that produces the final output.
The decision leaves open, for a future, properly framed application, the questions of whether AI-generated works can be registered with a human named as author and the AI system credited descriptively as the technological means of generation, and reaffirms that any wider recognition of AI authorship or personhood must come from Parliament, not the Copyright Office.
