I’ve been watching a pile of cases like this work their way through the courts with more than casual interest. As someone who spends his days in the weeds of music copyright, substantial similarity, and who can own and protect what, the question of whether an AI can be an “author,” is more than academic. It may have bearing, especially looking ahead a bit, on my philosophy and approach, and on my work product for the lawyers, creatives, and rights holders who hire me.

And when I say I’m “watching,” to a good extent, I mean I’m following Edward Lee’s Chat GPT Is Eating the World. He had made a serious, well-reasoned argument for why SCOTUS should take this case. I couldn’t find fault with it; I figured fait accompli. The core of it: unlike the companion patent case Thaler v. Vidal, where the Patent Code’s repeated use of the word “individuals” gave the Court a clear way out, the Copyright Act is, conveniently or not, messy. It never restricts “authors” to “natural persons,” and that phrase appears exactly once in the Act, in the definition of an anonymous work, which, if anything, I’d say cuts against the government’s position. And the work-made-for-hire doctrine already let’s non-human employers be authors — not “transferees,” not downstream “rights-holders,” but authors from the moment of creation.

I personally almost never signed a WFH. I think I can count em on half a hand. And for friends in each case. Bygones. Letting my mind drift here.

So what do we make of the denial? A few things.

First, cert denial is not an endorsement. The Court passing on Thaler v. Perlmutter doesn’t mean five Justices think the D.C. Circuit got it right. It means they weren’t ready to take it up today. The underlying statutory stuff Prof Lee explained… between the “human authorship” rule the Copyright Office insists on and the Copyright Act, which already treats corporations as authors, doesn’t disappear just because SCOTUS declined to weigh in.

And second, the question isn’t going away. AI-generated content is everywhere now, music, art, design, photography — it feels silly making a list. It’s everything. The volume of litigation touching authorship, originality, and chain of title in AI-assisted works is only going to grow. At some point, a set of facts will force an enduring ruling.

Third, and the part that matters most to a forensic musicologist, the Copyright Office’s “human authorship” requirement stands, for now, as operational reality. If you’re clearing AI-assisted music, registering AI-assisted works, or litigating ownership of them, you’re working within a framework that requires identifiable human creative contribution.

The Supreme Court will get to this eventually. Today just wasn’t the day.

For analysis behind why this case was worth watching, go check out Prof. Lee’s Chat GPT Is Eating the World.