On Aug. 18, 2023, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld a final refusal by the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) to register a visual work entitled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”

According to the application filed with the USCO by plaintiff Stephen Thaler, the image was not the product of human authorship but was instead “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” which the plaintiff called the “Creativity Machine” and identified as the “author” of the work. The plaintiff named himself as the copyright claimant, however, on the basis that he was the “owner of the machine.”