> When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way.
Your quoted text is no longer in TFA.
While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.
How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?
> Specifying an objective to the model is not enough. Directing how the work is constructed is what counts.
Unless you are running a local model, your prompts are almost certainly logged by your inference provider, and would only be a subpoena away?
So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.”
Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.
Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court.
Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other circuits have ruled and be guided by their reasoning, generally. The fact that the Supreme Court declined to grant cert actually carries weight.
> The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position.
> “The denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times.”
Moreover, SCOTUS does not decide issues, they decide cases.
> “We are acutely aware, however, that we sit to decide concrete cases, and not abstract propositions of law.”
When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time.
I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.