India's Registrar of Copyrights has turned down Stephen Thaler's application to register A Recent Entrance to Paradise, an image he says his AI system DABUS made on its own, with DABUS named as author. The order, issued in the last days of August by Registrar Unnat P Pandit, separates two questions: whether the work is original, and who can legally be its author.
On the first, the office found the image cleared the low originality bar of section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957, using the Supreme Court's minimal-creativity test from Eastern Book Company v D.B. Modak. It pointed to the arrangement of forms, colours and composition, noted that no earlier work had been shown to be copied, and said a computational process does not by itself make a work unoriginal.
On the second, it held that DABUS cannot be listed as author. The application failed because Thaler kept DABUS as author and himself as owner despite a chance to amend them.
Lawyers quoted in the report say the ruling could shape disputes over who authors and owns AI output when developers, users and businesses play different parts. They contrast it with the US, where Thaler lost because he claimed no human authorship, and the Supreme Court refused his appeal in March 2026. Indian law instead names the person who causes a computer-generated work to be created as its author, so autonomous generation alone need not rule out protection.
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