Artist is Suing Copyright Office For Refusing to Register His AI Image

An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.

In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatial because it was an expression of his creativity.

Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”

Allen entered Theatre D’opera Spatial into the Colorado State Fair fine art competition in the summer of 2022 and controversially won the contest; annoying the other artists who hadn’t used AI.

Allen then applied for his work to have copyright protection but the application was rejected by the Office in 2023. Theatre D’opera Spatial was made by inputting “at least 624” prompts into the AI image generator Midjourney before Allen got the picture he wanted. Afterward, he used Adobe Photoshop to “remove flaws and create new visual content” before using another photo editing software program, Gigapixel AI, to increase the resolution and size of the image.

But the Copyright Office has made it crystal clear that AI-generated pictures are not suitable for copyright protection.

A federal judge agreed with the Office and contrasted AI images to photography, which also uses a processor to capture images, but it is the human that decides on the elements of the picture, unlike AI imagery where the computer decides on the picture elements.

Nevertheless, Allen has vowed to continue to fight for copyright protection in a case that could have huge implications for artists and photographers alike.

“Mr. Allen had a specific artistic idea, conceived of in his mind, and he used Midjourney as a tool to create an artistic expression of that idea,” the lawsuit reads. “Such creative input is on par with that expressed by other types of artists and is capable of copyright protection.”