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Human Authorship Policy
What is human authorship policy?
In copyright law, since at least 1973, the United States has had a “human authorship policy” allowing only human authors (or an entity that owns the rights that initially belonged to the author) to register original creative works for protection. (The 2018 appeals court ruling in the “monkey selfie” case affirmed that non-humans cannot hold copyright.) The USPTO will not register works produced by a machine that operates automatically without human creative input or intervention. Original works of authorship also need to be “fixed in any tangible medium of expression.”