Registration guidance names a human-authorship rule with old examples

The image

There is no single photograph at issue; the source is administrative guidance the U.S. Copyright Office applies when it decides whether to register a claimed work at all. The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Chapter 300, sets out illustrative examples of images and objects the Office will not register, framed as a registration rule rather than a description of any particular artwork.

What the documents show

Section 306 of the Compendium states that 'the U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being,' citing the Supreme Court's Trade-Mark Cases and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony. Section 313.2, 'Works That Lack Human Authorship,' states 'the U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants,' listing examples including 'a photograph taken by a monkey' and 'a mural painted by an elephant.' The same section extends the rule to 'a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author,' quoting a 1965 Office report's test of whether a work's authorship elements were 'actually conceived and executed... by man' or by the device. The Office's Compendium homepage states the current, Third Edition text took effect 28 January 2021, comparing it against 'the 2017 version of the Compendium,' confirming a living, periodically revised document.

Production context

For anyone registering a still, a poster, or archival material involving automated capture, motion-control rigs, or AI-assisted output, Section 313.2's animal and machine examples describe the threshold question a registration application faces before any dispute over credit or imitation arises: whether a human's creative choices, not a device's automatic operation, produced the claimed authorship. The Compendium does not specify how much human involvement suffices in a mixed human-and-machine image; it states only the two poles, mechanical output on one side, human-conceived expression on the other.

Reference versus imitation

Citing the Compendium accurately means quoting its stated rule and its own listed examples, monkeys, elephants, driftwood, randomly operating machines, rather than treating Section 313.2 as though it were written specifically to address generative AI. The text itself predates the current generation of image models, and its authorship examples are animal- and mechanical-process-based; later guidance the Office has issued separately, not this Compendium chapter, addresses generative AI applications by name. Attributing an AI-specific origin to this section would misdescribe a general authorship rule as something narrower than the document actually states.

• Does a citation to Section 313.2 quote the Compendium's own animal- or machine-process examples, or invent new ones?
• Is the Compendium described as the current, revised text, or conflated with an earlier edition's wording?
• Does a claim about 'AI and copyright law' rely on this general authorship chapter, or on the Office's separate AI-specific guidance?

The Compendium's human-authorship section is a plainly stated administrative rule with its own long-standing examples; it is a foundation later disputes over machine-made images draw on, not a text written about those disputes itself.