SCOTUS Declines to Hear LLM-Backed AI Case Regarding Copyright

SCOTUS declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, a case where an AI system was listed as the sole author of an image for copyright registration purposes. The U.S. Copyright Office and DC Circuit Court both rejected the registration, and SCOTUS' denial of certiorari leaves that ruling standing. The Software Freedom Conservancy urges the FOSS community not to panic: the ruling is narrowly scoped to cases where a computer program is identified as the sole author, and does not address copyright in prompts, LLM weights, training data, or human-modified AI outputs. The DC Circuit's own dicta suggests human authors who create, operate, or use AI tools can still hold copyright in resulting works.