Dr. Stephen L. Thaler, "A Recent Entrance To Paradise" (Registrar of Copyrights, Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A)

Stephen L. Thaler is an American computer scientist who built DABUS, an AI system that he says generates ideas and images autonomously. He has used it to test whether the law of various countries will recognise a machine as an inventor or author; the patent side of the campaign in India is covered in a separate entry. In May 2022 he applied to the Indian Copyright Office to register an artistic work called "A Recent Entrance To Paradise", declaring DABUS as its author and himself as owner.¹²

The Copyright Act, 1957 contains one provision on computer-generated works. Section 2(d)(vi) provides that, for a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author is "the person who causes the work to be created". The Act does not define "person" for this clause, and it does not say that a machine can or cannot be an author. The only earlier Indian test of the point had been the registration of the artwork "Suryast" in 2020 with an AI tool named as co-author, which the Copyright Office later tried to withdraw.³⁴

The application, Diary No. 9356/2022-CO/A, was filed on 3 May 2022 under Section 45 of the Copyright Act, read with Rule 70 of the Copyright Rules, 2013. On 31 July 2023 the Office issued a discrepancy letter saying that the application did not identify a natural or juristic person recognised in law as the author, and called on Thaler to identify the person entitled to be entered as author. He replied on 25 August 2023, and the Office was not satisfied.¹

The application then sat undecided for nearly four years. On 9 April 2026 Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the Delhi High Court, hearing Thaler's petition in Stephen Thaler v. Union of India, noted that the Copyright Office had scheduled a hearing and disposed of the petition with a direction to the Registrar to conclude the proceedings expeditiously, preferably within eight weeks of the hearing. He did not rule on the substance.²

The Office issued a hearing notice on 8 April 2026 and heard the matter on 29 April, 25 May and 24 June 2026. It raised further objections on 7 May 2026 under Sections 2(d)(vi), 13 and 17, to which Thaler replied on 20 May. On 13 May 2026 the Registrar appointed Senior Advocate Rajeshwari Hariharan as amicus curiae to assist on the statutory scheme and comparative law, because the questions "have implications extending beyond the present application". A further notice of 12 June 2026 asked whether DABUS designed its own architecture, wrote its own code and trained itself, who the human persons responsible for configuring it are, and what the legal basis is for treating software as a person. At the hearing on 24 June the Registrar offered Thaler the chance to amend the author entry to name himself, and he declined. The order was reserved that day.¹

Thaler told the Office that DABUS, an interconnected system of artificial neural networks, generated the work through a sequence of stages including training, association formation, perturbation, monitoring, stabilisation and output generation, without any text prompt and without real-time human intervention at the output stage. The visual input consisted of photographs he took himself, the linguistic input consisted of curated thesaurus entries and English sentences, and he supplied brief textual descriptions to link them. He argued that his own contribution was "antecedent": it created the conditions in which the work could be generated.¹

He relied on Eastern Book Company to argue that originality does not require direct human aesthetic judgment. He argued that Section 2(d)(vi) must be read functionally, so that DABUS, as the immediate and operative cause of the work, is the author, and he drew analogies to a company being the producer of a film under Section 2(d)(v) and to a deity acting through a next friend. He later accepted that DABUS is not a juristic person and cannot own, assign or enforce copyright, and he asked in the alternative that the Register name him as author with a remark recording DABUS as the generator, but only on condition that DABUS be officially recognised in that role. He also relied on a Rajya Sabha reply of 9 February 2024 saying that the existing Copyright and Patent Acts are well equipped to protect AI-generated works.¹

The Registrar answered four questions, confining the order "to the particular application and the facts disclosed by the Applicant".¹

Originality. The Registrar applied the standard of independent creation with a minimal degree of creativity from Eastern Book Company and held that the work met it. The final composition was not supplied in its final form, was not shown to reproduce any identified earlier work, and had sufficient independently generated expressive character. Statistical processing and pattern recognition describe the mechanism and do not decide whether the expression is original, and the absence of real-time human intervention does not by itself defeat originality.

Who caused the work to be created. The Registrar read Section 2(d) as a legislative allocation of authorship for each class of work, which attributes authorship to the person who conceived the work and not to those whose contribution is closest to the output. Section 2(d)(vi) therefore does not ask which device generated the final pixels. It asks who in law "caused" the work, meaning who exercised creative control and made the proximate and material arrangements, and that is "the principal architect of the work and not the executor thereof". On Thaler's account, DABUS performed the immediate computation within an architecture and process configured by Thaler, so he is the person who caused the work to be created.

Whether DABUS can be an author. The Registrar held that DABUS is not a natural or juristic person. Analogies to a company as a film producer under Section 2(d)(v) failed because a company is already a legal person and Section 2(d)(v) is a separate legislative choice. The deity or next-friend analogy failed because representation presupposes existing legal personality. The Rajya Sabha reply of February 2024 only confirms that the Act is broad enough to protect works created with AI tools through the person who causes them, and an executive statement cannot rewrite the statute.

Ownership and the Remarks column. Under Sections 17 to 19, the author is the first owner and rights move only by statutory exception or a written assignment, and DABUS, lacking legal personality, cannot assign anything to Thaler. The Registrar held that the Register must show a coherent chain of title so that a prospective licensee knows who can grant a licence. The "Remarks" column cannot confer authorship or legal status on an AI system, and the Registrar cannot amend an application suo motu.¹

The Registrar summarised the holdings as: the work satisfies the limited originality threshold; DABUS cannot be entered as author; Thaler is the person who caused the particular work to be created and so can be identified as its statutory author; the particulars as filed are inconsistent with Sections 2(d)(vi) and 17 to 19; and no descriptive reference to DABUS can cure an application that names it as author. The order adds that whether legal personhood or authorship should ever be extended to autonomous AI "remains a policy decision strictly reserved for Parliament".¹

The application was rejected, but expressly not for its initial errors: rejection followed because naming DABUS as author remained Thaler's "deliberate and continuing case despite notice, hearing and an express opportunity to amend". The order leaves him free to pursue remedies with correct particulars, and it leaves open whether a neutral remark identifying DABUS as the technological system could be entered if properly requested.¹

The order is narrow in important respects. It does not decide how much human involvement, such as typing a prompt into a commercial tool, makes a person the author of an AI-assisted work. It does not decide whether every use of AI must be disclosed on the Register, which it says may require a uniform policy or changes to the forms. MediaNama's first report said it was unclear whether any registration had been granted, but the order itself shows that the application was rejected.¹⁵

MediaNama reported the decision on 1 September 2026 as India saying that AI art can get copyright but that AI cannot be the author, and noted that the position is narrower than a flat ban on copyright in AI-generated output.⁵ Bar & Bench similarly headlined it as AI-generated work being able to get copyright while the AI system cannot be the author.⁶

In an analysis dated 3 September 2026, two NLSIU students writing on SpicyIP criticised the order on several points. They argue that the Registrar treated an "initiator" and a "mastermind" or effective cause as interchangeable, when creative control over the expressive elements is the relevant test. They say that if DABUS is the author it cannot transfer rights, and that no statutory basis was identified for vesting copyright directly in Thaler. They question whether concepts such as discernment in Eastern Book Company can apply to non-cognitive computation, and they suggest that the Register could record AI involvement and human contribution, as the US Copyright Office requires, without deciding AI authorship.⁷

Thaler told MediaNama that the Office was partly right: the work can be protected, but it was wrong to record him as author on the "autonomy in execution" reasoning. He called the outcome "a pivotal partial recognition, rather than a flat refusal" and said he would continue to "challenge these decisions judicially", but he had not committed to an appeal. He also said that he intends to use the Suryast registration, in which an AI tool is a recorded co-author, to show inconsistency in the Office's history.⁸

The order is the first reasoned Indian determination on the authorship of AI-generated work. It rests on the text of Section 2(d)(vi): it accepts that the Act can protect AI-generated output, but only through a human or other legal person who caused the work to be created. That position is consistent with the Patent Office's refusal of Thaler's DABUS patent application, which also held that only a natural person can be an inventor, and it sits uneasily with the continuing presence on the Register of the Suryast registration naming RAGHAV as co-author.

The order was passed while the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade's expert committee on generative AI and copyright had published only Part I of its working paper, on training data. MediaNama could not find a published Part II, which was to address AI outputs, as of September 2026.⁵

As of 15 October 2026, no appeal against the order has been verified. Thaler said on 4 September 2026 that he was deferring the question to his counsel, and any challenge would follow the routes available under the Copyright Act.⁸