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The United States Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal of a lower-court ruling that the U. S. Copyright Office's understanding that copyright only applies to works by human authors. The Court had also rejected another appeal, by the same plaintiff, of a ruling that affirmed a similar policy on the part the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office.

I'm not a intellectual property lawyer, but it appears to me that between these rulings, items created by generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if/when it comes along, are not eligible for intellectual property protection. In the case of most audio/visual media, I'm not sure that this will really move the needle all that much, at least at the start. But in the case of inventions, it could have repercussions. If part of the promise of automation is that it could create new medically-useful drugs, or create other products, the inability to patent them may be a strike against broad adoption of the technology for such purposes. Given this, it seems that large companies will take this lying down. I doubt that they'll attempt to directly re-litigate these sorts of cases; it's highly unlikely that this, or a future Supreme Court would reverse itself on this, simply because it was Pfizer Inc. bringing the appeal, unless things had gotten to a point where the Court simply stopped caring if the public felt that it was openly in the pocket of Big Business.

And so that leaves Congress. If corporations are going to want to outsource their research and development to some datacenter somewhere, and still be able to claim a government-enforced monopoly on whatever it is said datacenter comes up with, intellectual property law will have to change. And, regardless of what individual Representatives and Senators might say, Congress tends to be very willing to openly ally itself with business interests, and then make the case that they're doing it all in the name of helping the general public.

Of course, it's unlikely that the overall business community will be aligned on this; there are likely to be some sectors who feel that computer creations having to be either closely-guarded trade secrets or effectively in the public domain works in their favor, and so I can see lobbyists working both sides of the issue here.

But (as there always is), there's a simpler way, perhaps to deal with such issues: lying. I wouldn't put it past anyone, especially not someone who feels that they've created an amazing new advance in some field or another, to simply claim that a person invented it. The same goes for artwork, for that matter; launder something through Photoshop enough times, and would it be possible to determine that the original had been created by a machine? In this way, I can see detection of automation-generated outputs becoming a big business, if for no other reason than the amount of money that could be on the line.

There's also another angle: If the Copyright and Patent/Trademark Offices won't grant protection to the outputs or autonomous automation, that's another obstacle to the idea of a one-person company with a billion-dollar valuation. Because if they can't copyright or patent the products or services that the agents produce; they'd have to be in business that's extremely difficult to copy.