The Indian Copyright Office’s order rejecting Stephen Thaler’s attempt to register an AI-generated artwork with his AI system DABUS as the author distinguishes between the originality of an AI-generated work and the legal identity of its author. The decision could have wider implications for copyright in AI-generated content, particularly where developers, users and businesses play different roles in the creation process. The order could also open doors for disputes over who qualifies as the author and, consequently, who owns the resulting copyright.
On Monday, Registrar of Copyrights prof. (Dr.) Unnat P Pandit held that “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” satisfied the limited threshold of originality under section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957, but ruled that DABUS could not be entered as its author under Section 2(d)(vi). The application was ultimately rejected because Thaler continued to identify DABUS as the author and himself as the owner, despite being given an opportunity to amend the authorship particulars.
The Registrar applied the Supreme Court’s “minimal degree of creativity” standard in Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak concluded that the artwork contained a particular arrangement of visual forms, colours, tonal variations, spatial relationships and compositional elements. The work was not shown to reproduce an identified pre-existing work and, on the material before the Office, possessed sufficient independently generated expressive character to satisfy section 13.
The office held that the algorithmic or computational nature of the creation process could not, by itself, make the resulting expression unoriginal.
The decision comes against the backdrop of Thaler’s parallel litigation in the US, where courts rejected attempts to recognise DABUS as the author of an AI-generated artwork. The US Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler’s appeal in March 2026.
“The US Copyright Office and the D.C. Circuit (Thaler v. Perlmutter) rejected Thaler’s claim on the ground that the US Copyright Act requires a human author, and since Thaler insisted DABUS, not himself to be the author, with no human authorship claimed at all, the work was ineligible for registration in its entirety. The US courts did not consider whether a human “controller” of the AI could be the author, because Thaler never asserted his own authorship,” said Swati Sharma, partner and head of intellectual property at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.
“Indian law takes a different statutory route. It expressly recognises computer-generated works and identifies the author as the ‘person who causes the work to be created’. Therefore, the AI cannot be the author, but autonomous generation by AI does not, by itself, prevent copyright protection,” said Ankit Sahni, counsel for Thaler and partner at Ajay Sahni Associates.
Who “caused” the work to be created?
The order’s potential business implication lies in its interpretation of Section 2(d)(vi), which defines the author of a computer-generated literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work as “the person who causes the work to be created.”
The Registrar rejected Thaler’s argument that DABUS was the “immediate and operative cause” of the artwork while Thaler was merely an upstream cause. Instead, the Office held that the statutory enquiry cannot be displaced by focusing on the technological instrument that produces the immediate output.
That does not mean, however, that simply owning or developing an AI system automatically gives a person copyright over everything it generates.
“The Registrar is at pains to establish that the statutory phrase itself is the controlling test, expressions such as “mastermind”, “effective cause” and “principal architect”, borrowed from Aalmuhammed v. Lee and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, being offered as descriptive aids which he expressly declines to elevate into additional statutory requirements,” said Arijit Benjamin, associate partner at Prosoll Law.
“Once that person is identified, Section 17 makes him the first owner of the copyright, subject to the provisos in clauses (a) to (e), to any agreement to the contrary, and to the possibility of a written assignment conforming to Sections 18 and 19. Two qualifications deserve emphasis. The enquiry is work-specific, and the Registrar is explicit that a person does not become the author of every output merely because he owns, designed or developed the system which produced it. Where no human being answers the statutory description, the order leaves the position undetermined, and the practical consequence is a work for which no author can lawfully be entered and no chain of title trace,” he added.
“Ordinarily, the author is also the first owner of copyright under Section 17, subject to statutory exceptions relating to employment, commissioned works and other relationships,” said Dr. Sudhir Raja Ravindran, attorney-at-law and solicitor (England & Wales) at Altacit Global. “Therefore, copyright will not necessarily belong to whoever presses the final button or enters the last prompt. Courts may ultimately have to examine who exercised the relevant degree of control over the creation: the developer who designed the system, the user who directed the output, the company deploying the technology, or some combination of these circumstances.”
Could the order trigger disputes between AI developers, companies and end users?
The work-specific approach could become particularly significant in commercial AI deployments, where the person who develops an AI model may not be the same person who configures it, prompts it or selects the final output.
An enterprise could, for instance, use an AI model developed by a third-party provider, configure it internally, have an employee provide instructions and then have another employee edit the resulting material.
The DABUS order does not establish a fixed rule that ownership or development of an AI system automatically translates into authorship of its outputs.
The Registrar held that the application’s assertion that DABUS was author while Thaler was owner could not be reconciled with sections 17-19. If DABUS were treated as the author, it would need legal capacity to hold and transfer copyright. But DABUS, the applicant itself acknowledged, had no such legal personality or contractual capacity.
At the same time, the Registrar made clear that this did not mean Thaler could never own copyright. If he were correctly identified as the statutory author, Section 17 would ordinarily make him the first owner, subject to applicable statutory exceptions or agreements. That distinction is likely to impact companies using AI at scale.
“Potentially, yes,” said Sahni. “The difficult question will often be identifying who caused the particular work to be created. The order importantly clarifies that merely owning or developing an AI system does not give someone copyright over every output it generates. The enquiry is work-specific and turns on the person’s creative control and sufficiently proximate and material role in bringing that particular work into existence. Contractual allocation of rights between developers, users and employers will therefore become increasingly important.”
“The Registrar was careful to note that the causal inquiry under Section 2(d)(vi) “must nevertheless remain work-specific” and that “a person does not become the author of every output merely because that person owns, designed or developed the computer system” and that there must be a “legally sufficient connection between the acts of the identified person and the origination of a particular work,” said Sharma.
“This means that where the developer of the underlying AI system, the deployer/operator of that system, and the end user prompting or configuring it are different people, each could plausibly claim to be the “mastermind” for a given output, and the test does not mechanically assign authorship to any one category by default. The order describes the operative test using terms like “creative control,” “effective cause” and “principal architect” as descriptive aids, not bright-line rules, to identify whose acts bear “a sufficiently direct and substantial relationship to the creation of the work,” she added
“Contract will do a great deal of work in this field, since ownership may be allocated through the “agreement to the contrary” route and by assignment under Section 18, but authorship cannot be contracted for. That is the fault line along which the litigation will run,” Ravindran added.
The order is significant as the Copyright Office’s position on AI authorship, but it is not equivalent to a binding judicial precedent.
“Its authority is persuasive rather than binding, and the order is admirably candid on the point,” noted Benjamin. “The Registrar exercises quasi-judicial power under Section 45 read with Rule 70 of the Copyright Rules, 2013. He is not a court, and nothing he decides is a declaration of law within the meaning of Article 141. His order is appealable to the High Court under Section 72 within three months, as that provision now stands following the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021, and it would not survive a contrary judicial holding.”
“Registration in India is optional and the Register is no more than prima facie evidence under Section 48, as the Bombay High Court reaffirmed in Sanjay Soya Pvt. Ltd. v. Narayani Trading Co. on 9 March 2021, so that a refusal extinguishes no copyright. And the same Office continues to carry the SURYAST registration, A-135120/2020, naming the artificial intelligence tool RAGHAV as a co-author, under a withdrawal notice of 25 November 2021 never brought to a conclusion and which the present order nowhere addresses. Until a High Court speaks, this is the most carefully reasoned administrative view available, and it is no more than that,” Benjamin concluded.
