Explore / How we got here

What changed, and what did not?

Earlier tools and decisions help explain today’s arguments.

10 records

Prepared 16 Sept 2026 · original source dates retained

Feist rejected sweat-of-the-brow protection and required minimal creativity, a standard the Office's registration practice still applies.

3 min · source-led record↗

Burrow-Giles tied photographic copyright to posing and arrangement, the human-authorship line the 2023 AI guidance calls its leading case.

3 min · source-led record↗

The Ninth Circuit held a macaque lacks Copyright Act standing, reasoning the Office's own AI guidance still leans on against non-human authors.

3 min · source-led record↗

Vannevar Bush's 1945 memex proposal describes associative retrieval decades before word processors, not a machine that composes text.

3 min · source-led record↗

Weizenbaum's 1966 ELIZA paper describes keyword pattern-matching, not language generation, and warns against reading fluency as understanding.

3 min · source-led record↗

Microsoft's own developer documentation describes spelling and grammar checks as flagged suggestions a user decides on, not silent rewrites.

3 min · source-led record↗

Word's tracked-changes documentation records who changed what, a visible-edit mechanism disclosure proposals now borrow for AI-assisted drafts.

3 min · source-led record↗

Tegic's 1995 patent describes a frequency-ranked dictionary lookup for ambiguous keypresses, the direct ancestor of today's predictive text.

3 min · source-led record↗

Nuance's Dragon dictation line, now under Microsoft, still documents converting spoken words into editable text rather than drafting them.

3 min · source-led record↗

Google's own 2006 posts show Writely acquired, then merged with Spreadsheets into the always-online, multi-editor document.

3 min · source-led record↗