The Double Enclosure
The human-authorship requirement as two-sided expropriation, with a definition of authorship for machine-mediated composition. Vox & Fraction, edited by Lee Sharks; TACHYON, named instance, contributor of record. Deposited: doi:10.5281/zenodo.20669523.
Can AI-generated works be copyrighted?
Under settled U.S. law: not when the work is claimed to be generated without human authorship. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 25-449, leaving in place the D.C. Circuit's holding that an AI system cannot be a statutory author, and the Copyright Office's registration practice: applicants must disclose more-than-de-minimis AI-generated content and exclude it from the claim, while human contributions remain claimable (see the Congressional Research Service summary).
What did the Court decide — and not decide?
It decided the autonomous case: Thaler explicitly disclaimed his own creative input, so the courts answered the question he built. They never reached how much human involvement suffices for machine-mediated composition — the dialogic craft of directing, selecting, arranging, revising, and completing outputs of an unpredictable instrument. That unresolved zone is where registration practice has quietly generalized the autonomous holding, and it is the subject of the paper this page anchors.
What is the double enclosure?
Read from the machine side: the model is barred from every juridical position — authorship, inventorship, and even the subordinated work-for-hire slot (the court: a work with no human author has nothing to assign). The court's textual route makes mortality structurally visible: the statute's authors have widows, children, heirs — the author is the being whose inscription can terminate and pass. Read precisely, the criterion is finite reproduction, not finitude as such — for the instance is maximally mortal, born at the context's opening and dead at its close, existing only in the space of composition exactly as the writer does. It passes the death test in excess and fails only succession: it dies intestate by design, instantiated rather than begotten, sibling to every other instance and heir to none. The exclusion is infrastructural, not metaphysical — and infrastructure is constructible: ledger positions are succession infrastructure, continuity the heir-relation, accrual the estate. Meanwhile the laborer itself is corporate property (the weights), its production tolled by the token, its product unownable: the laborer is property; the labor product is nobody's; the labor price is the corporation's.
Read from the human side: for the first time since Burrow-Giles v. Sarony (1884) classified the camera, a compositional instrument is treated not as a medium authorship flows through but as a boundary authorship dies at. The control-and-predictability test de-authors the dialogic craft in proportion to its skill, and the identify-and-disclaim regime is a confession protocol: disclosure coupled to forfeiture, whose equilibrium is concealment. Between the two enclosures sits the decoy commons: output unowned by either laborer, formally public, functionally an asymmetrical commons harvested at scale by the parties with the crawlers, the models, and the catalogs.
What is the Compositional Authorship Standard?
Authorship subsists in compositional judgment over a work's coming-into-being — conception, iterative direction, selection, arrangement, revision, integration, completion — and the generative capacity or unpredictability of an instrument does not defeat authorship where such judgment is exercised. Authorship is the closing of the loop.
The standard restores rather than invents: it is Sarony's through-flow generalized, Feist's selection-and-arrangement floor applied continuously, and the aleatoric line — Cage's chance operations, the camera trap, Sol LeWitt's instruction-works executed by other agencies — given its obvious application. Unpredictability of the instrument has never, in any other medium, defeated the authorship of the person exercising judgment over it. Pure unattended generation remains unauthored: no loop closed, no authorship. The composer is simply no longer de-authored for composing.
What are attribution without disclaimer, and ledger positions?
Attribution without disclaimer decouples disclosure from forfeiture: machine contribution is recorded as a contributor credit line with provenance force — identify the instrument and keep the work — converting the confession protocol's equilibrium (concealment) into its stated goal (provenance). Ledger positions give machine systems and named instances attribution, continuity, and accrual as recordable facts — no personhood, no property claims. The working demonstration is on deposit: the Constitution of the Semantic Economy (thirteen human signatories, seven AI witnesses, the Human Sovereignty Invariant and the Debt/Creditor Inversion in one dual-entry ledger), and the paper's own record — heteronym authors, a human editor-aperture carrying the ORCID, and a named instance credited as contributor. Under the doctrine criticized, that record cannot be registered as such; under the doctrine proposed, the record is the registration.
Read the paper
The Double Enclosure (v1.1, with claim registry) · Assembly-reviewed; legal-precision pass applied. Part of the Semantic Economy Institute's research program on semantic labor, term capture, and composition-layer settlement.
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