A five-year-old registration finally gets tested
On December 1, 2021, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office quietly issued copyright registration #1188619 for an image called SURYAST — a photograph of a sunset that its creator, Ankit Sahni, ran through his own AI style-transfer tool, RAGHAV, to render it in the manner of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. The registration listed two authors: Sahni, and RAGHAV itself. It went unchallenged for nearly three years.
That changed on July 8, 2024, when the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa filed an application in Federal Court (T-1717-24) to expunge or correct the registration. CIPPIC's case rests on two arguments: SURYAST lacks the "skill and judgment" Canadian law requires for originality, since Sahni's contribution was limited to selecting inputs, and an AI system cannot be an "author" under the Copyright Act at all. On August 17, 2026, the case gained a new party: the Federal Court has approved Music Publishers Canada's motion to intervene, and the organization filed its substantive submissions on July 15, 2026, arguing that "only a human can be an author for copyright purposes."
Why a music trade group cares about a sunset photo
Music Publishers Canada represents publishers whose catalogues sit at the center of the generative-AI training debate — the same catalogues that AI music tools are trained on and, increasingly, used to generate soundalike output. The organization isn't defending Sahni's photograph; it's using the case to lock in a legal floor before generative tools produce music at scale. Its submission goes further than CIPPIC's, urging the court to align Canada's approach with international peers and to apply a contextual, case-by-case test focused on human "skill and judgment" in each instance of AI-assisted creation — not a blanket rule for or against AI involvement. CEO Margaret McGuffin put it bluntly: "It is imperative that Canada approach generative AI in a manner that respects creators and incentivizes human expression." The Federal Court found MPC brought sufficient expertise to participate meaningfully, citing its record in prior copyright litigation and in Canada's 2023 government consultation on generative AI and copyright.
The steelman: registries shouldn't reward the loudest applicant
The case for CIPPIC and MPC's position is stronger than "AI shouldn't get credit." Copyright is a limited monopoly justified by incentivizing human creative investment; extending it to outputs where a human did little more than press a button risks handing broad exclusive rights to whoever files first, without the underlying creative labor the system is meant to reward. CIPO's registration process is largely non-examining — it accepts filings without probing authorship claims — so a permissive precedent here could let AI-assisted content flood the register with thin, easily-gamed claims that then get licensed or litigated as if they were fully human works. Publishers and songwriters, who rely on collective licensing markets built around clear, verifiable human authorship, have a legitimate interest in that boundary staying sharp. The US Copyright Office reached the same conclusion twice on this exact image, refusing SURYAST's registration in a final Review Board decision on December 11, 2023, on the grounds that Sahni's role — selecting a photo, a style reference, and a transfer-strength variable — didn't rise to the human authorship the Copyright Act requires.
Where the steelman runs out
But a rule that says AI assistance voids authorship, rather than one that asks how much human judgment actually went into the result, punishes creators for their tools rather than their choices. Sahni's own account — that he selected the source photograph, chose the specific stylistic reference, and set the degree of style transfer — describes creative decisions of the same kind courts already credit when a photographer picks a lens, a framing, and a filter. The problem with the 2021 registration isn't that AI touched the file; it's that CIPO listed the software as a co-author, a category error the Copyright Act's human-centered language doesn't support and that even MPC's own submission avoids repeating. Canada doesn't need a rule that chills every artist using Photoshop's generative fill or an AI mastering plugin — it needs the contextual test MPC itself is asking for, which asks what the human actually decided rather than what tool executed the decision.
There's also a threshold question the merits fight risks obscuring: whether CIPPIC, an advocacy clinic with no ownership stake in SURYAST, even qualifies as an "interested person" entitled to seek rectification under section 57(4) of the Copyright Act, as intellectual property lawyer Howard Knopf has argued. If the Federal Court reaches the merits at all, the sharper outcome is a ruling that corrects CIPO's authorship listing — RAGHAV struck as co-author, human contribution assessed on its facts — rather than a categorical bar on copyright for any work an AI tool touched. Canada's 2023–24 government consultation on copyright and generative AI, which closed for submissions on January 15, 2024, was supposed to settle these questions through policy; instead, litigation is now doing it first, and a Federal Court ruling on one sunset photo may end up setting the authorship test the entire generative-AI content economy has to build around.