But Millett pushed back, writing that “statutory construction requires more than just finding a sympathetic dictionary definition.”
“The text of multiple provisions of the statute indicates that authors must be humans, not machines,” the judge said, pointing to numerous examples.
Machines don’t have lives or spouses, judge noted
Perhaps most glaringly, the duration of copyright is typically limited to “the author’s lifespan or to a period that approximates how long a human might live,” Millett wrote.
“Of course, machines do not have ‘lives,’ nor is the length of their operability generally measured in the same terms as a human life,” Millett wrote.
Additionally, the judge noted that the statute allows copyrights to be transferred to surviving spouses or children, which machines do not have. It also refers to authors’ domiciles and nationalities, which machines do not have. And critically, authors granted copyrights have intentions, whereas “machines lack minds and do not intend anything,” Millett wrote.
Accepting Thaler’s arguments would mean “problematic questions would arise about a machine’s ‘life’ and ‘death,'” Millett wrote. “And ‘machine’ would inconsistently mean both an author and a tool used by authors.”
Judge mocks Data’s poetry, says machines can’t be authors
In the court’s view, the statute considers machines to always be tools, never authors. That includes Thaler’s Creativity Machine, Millett wrote. She urged that Thaler’s arguments would be best made to Congress or the Copyright Office, not to courts.
However, according to the judge, “the Creativity Machine does not represent the limits of human technical ingenuity when it comes to artificial intelligence,” and Congress or the Copyright Office could adapt laws or guidance if “humans at some point might produce creative non-humans capable” of being incentivized to create artworks, as humans are.
