ABSTRACT
Copyright’s human authorship requirement is an institutional attempt to assert legal, moral, and sociological legitimacy at a time of crisis. The US Copyright Office, the courts, and the so-called copyright humanists, portray the requirement as a beacon of copyright’s faith, meant to protect authors in the AI era. The minimal threshold for human authorship, however, forces us to question whether it is merely rhetoric, which the law has always employed regardless of its justification. This Article bridges the gap between doctrinal, theoretical, socio-legal and constitutionalist scholarship, arguing that human authorship is an ideology to which the law is only nominally faithful. The Article analyzes the US Copyright Office’s pronouncements, the DC Circuit ruling in Thaler v Perlmutter, and the pending case of Allen v Perlmutter, arguing that the Office’s approach, despite its rhetoric, is not meant to meaningfully stop the AI revolution. Whether interpreted broadly or narrowly, the human authorship requirement is unlikely to protect the interests of human authors in the AI era. Incorporating insights from copyright history and theoretical debates about romantic authorship, this Article argues that copyright has failed to protect those interests for over a century, instead favoring the interests of powerful corporations. If and when copyright becomes a regime for robots, the question is whether that expansion will also primarily benefit corporations. Arguably, copyright has never cared much for human authors-and it is time to question if we should keep pretending otherwise.
Blaszczyk, Matt, Posthuman Copyright: AI, Copyright, and Legitimacy (August 1, 2025).
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