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Can a work entirely created by a machine be protected by copyright? On Valentine’s Day, the US Copyright Office (Review Board)  answered  this question with a heartbreaking ‘no’, holding that “copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind”” and consequently refusing to register the two-dimensional artwork 'A Recent Entrance to Paradise' below (the ‘Work’): Creativity Machine's A Recent Entrance to Paradise Background In 2018, Stephen Thaler (if the name rings an  AI inventor-bell  then you’re hearing it right) applied to register a copyright claim in the Work, indicating “Creativity Machine” as the author and Thaler as the owner of such machine. The application stated that the Work had been autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine. Registration was sought as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine. In 2019, the Copyright Office rejected the applicatio...

Over the past few months several media outlets have been reporting on a series of copyright lawsuits filed in the US against celebrities over their social media (in particular: Instagram) feeds  [Katposts by Hayleigh  here ,  here , and  here ] .  Whilst some of these lawsuits concerned fairly straightforward issues, that is the publication of third-party photographs portraying third parties  [eg, Versace publishing a photograph of Jennifer Lopez wearing Versace:  here ; or super-model Gigi Hadid posting a picture of her boyfriend  Zayn Malik :  here ] , others are potentially more intriguing in that they relate to the publication by celebrities of photographs of themselves.  The first of this series of recent lawsuits is the one concerning the publication, by Gigi Hadid on her Instagram account, of this photograph of herself taken by a paparazzo:  The complaint was eventually  dismissed  becaus...