Nolan Watson, president and CEO of Sandstorm Gold (TSX:SSL,NYSE:SAND), discusses the outlook for his company, as well has his broader thoughts on gold.
Even as the yellow metal trades at or near all-time highs, he sees further gains ahead.
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
: A top former spokesperson for former President Joe Biden blasted President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress for proposing potential judicial impeachments as the administration encounters court-imposed obstacles in enacting its agenda.
Former White House spokesperson Andrew Bates now advises a group known as Unlikely Allies, which says it is working to create ‘cross-partisan support for the needs and interests of all Americans.’
‘Radical, corrupt attacks on judges are putting our Constitution and the freedom of every single American in danger from government overreach,’ Bates told Fox News Digital on the group’s behalf. ‘For the first time in history, our president and members of his party in Congress are colluding to impeach any federal judge who stops the most powerful person in the world from breaking the law.
‘The president has also called for making dissent illegal, which would trample the First Amendment and threaten the fundamental right of any American to disagree with his agenda — whether it’s cutting taxes for the rich or raising the prices he falsely promised to lower.’
According to the group, Unlikely Allies ‘is made up of everyday citizens, families, communities, and organizations who are committed to solving our toughest problems, together.’
‘Driven by the values that unite us, our goal is to create unified, cross-partisan support for the needs and interests of all Americans. This isn’t about left or right, Republican or Democrat — it’s about American values and holding our government accountable,’ a description of the organization says.
The White House responded to Bates’ statement, with deputy press secretary Anna Kelly telling Fox News Digital, ‘Biden communications alum Andrew Bates has no credibility after lying to the world about Biden’s cognitive decline. Just like these judges, Bates is a left-wing activist masquerading as a nonpartisan as he works to destroy the separation of powers and subvert the will of the American people.’
The dispute comes as federal judges across the country continue to impose restrictions on Trump actions until further review and legal determinations.
Recently, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg granted an emergency order to temporarily halt the administration’s deportation flights of illegal immigrants.
The judge granted an order to review the 1798 wartime-era Alien Enemies Act being invoked by the administration to immediately deport Venezuelan nationals and alleged members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua.
This only further angered the president, who appeared to call for Boasberg’s impeachment.
‘This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!’ Trump said on Truth Social.
Republicans in general have appeared to scrutinize the ability of federal district judges to make blanket nationwide orders in recent days.
‘Federal judges aren’t there to replace presidential policy choices,’ Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote on X. ‘Nor is it their job to neuter presidents by delaying presidential decisions.
‘Their job is to resolve disputes about what the law says.’
Lee also said he is working on a bill to address the issue.
In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has a measure that would prevent federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. Multiple sources told Fox News Digital Trump has shown interest in Issa’s bill. Top White House aides shared as much with senior Capitol Hill staff this week, explaining that ‘the president wants this.’
The recent wave of preliminary injunctions from federal judges has stymied President Donald Trump’s early agenda in his second White House term, prompting new questions as to how far the administration might go if it opts to challenge these court orders.
Federal judges across the country have blocked Trump’s ban on transgender persons serving in the U.S. military, ordered the reinstatement of core functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and halted Elon Musk’s government efficiency organization, DOGE, from oversight and access to government agencies, among other things. They’ve also temporarily halted deportations, or attempted to, so judges can consider the relevant laws.
Combined, the wave of rulings has been met with outrage from Trump administration officials, some of whom said they plan to appeal the rulings to the Supreme Court, if needed. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has used her podium to rail against ‘radical left-wing judges,’ who she has alleged are acting with a political agenda to block Trump’s executive orders.
‘These judicial activists want to unilaterally stop President Trump from deporting foreign terrorists, hiring and firing executive branch employees, and determining the readiness of our troops,’ Leavitt said on X, expanding on remarks made Wednesday at a press briefing.
‘They MUST be reined in,’ she added.
Some of Trump’s supporters in Congress have threatened judges who block the president’s agenda with impeachment, while his critics worry the president’s attacks on the judiciary will collapse the constitutional system, bringing to the fore an impassioned debate over the separation of powers in the Constitution.
Here’s a rundown of where things stand.
U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang, an Obama appointee, ruled on Tuesday that DOGE’s efforts to dismantle USAID ‘on an accelerated basis’ likely violated the U.S. Constitution ‘in multiple ways’ and ordered the partial restoration of the agency’s functions, including reinstatement of personnel access to email and payment systems.
Chuang’s preliminary injunction is believed to be the first to directly invoke Musk himself. It said Musk could interact with USAID employees only after being granted ‘express authorization’ from an agency official, and it blocked DOGE from engaging in any further work at USAID.
Hours later, U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes issued a preliminary injunction barring the Pentagon from enforcing Trump’s order on transgender persons serving in the military.
Reyes, the first openly gay member of the court, wrote in a scathing 79-page ruling that the Trump administration failed to demonstrate that transgender service members would hinder military readiness, relying on what she described as ‘pure conjecture’ to attempt to justify the policy and thus causing undue harm to thousands of current U.S. service members.
Both rulings are almost certain to be challenged by the Trump administration. In fact, Reyes was so confident that the Justice Department would file an emergency appeal that she delayed her ruling from taking force until Friday to allow the Trump administration time to file for an emergency stay.
Reyes wasn’t wrong. Senior administration officials vowed to challenge the wave of court rulings, which they said are an attempt by the courts to unduly infringe on presidential powers.
‘We are appealing this decision, and we will win,’ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on social media.
‘District court judges have now decided they are in command of the Armed Forces…is there no end to this madness?’ White House policy adviser Stephen Miller said later in a post on X.
Several other high-profile cases are playing out in real time that could test the fraught relationship between the courts and the executive branch, and next steps remain deeply uncertain.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg warned the Trump administration on Wednesday that it could face consequences for violating his court order temporarily blocking it from invoking a little-known wartime law to immediately deport Venezuelan nationals from U.S. soil, including alleged members of the gang Tren de Aragua, for 14 days.
Boasberg handed down the temporary restraining order Saturday evening, around the time that the Trump administration proceeded to deport hundreds of migrants, including Venezuelan nationals subject to the Alien Enemies Act, to El Salvador. He also ordered in a bench ruling shortly after that any planes carrying these individuals return to the U.S.
But at least one plane with migrants deported by the law in question touched down later that evening in El Salvador.
‘Oopsie, too late,’ El Salvador’s president said in a post on X.
In the days since, government lawyers citing national security protections have refused to share information in court about the deportation flights and whether the plane (or planes) of migrants knowingly departed U.S. soil after the judge ordered them not to do so.
The White House has repeatedly asserted that lower court judges like Boasberg should not have the power to prevent the president from executing what it argues is a lawful agenda, though the judges in question have disagreed that the president’s actions all follow the law.
‘A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil,’ Leavitt told Fox News.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said in an interview on ‘Fox & Friends’ this week: ‘We are not stopping.’
‘I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming,’ Homan said, adding, ‘Another fight. Another fight every day.’
The administration’s appeals, which are all almost guaranteed, may have a better chance of success than previous cases that reached appellate courts, including one in which the Supreme Court ruled against the president.
There are two types of near-term relief that federal judges can offer plaintiffs before convening both parties to the court for a full case on the merits: a preliminary injunction and a temporary restraining order, or a TRO.
A TRO immediately blocks an action for 14 days to allow more time for consideration. But it’s a difficult test for plaintiffs to satisfy: they must prove that the order in question would pose immediate and ‘irreparable harm’– an especially burdensome level of proof, especially if it hinges on an action or order that has not yet come into force.
The outcomes, as a result, are very narrow in scope. One could look to the TRO request granted by U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali earlier this month, which required the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion in owed money for previously completed USAID projects.
Since it did not deal with current contracts or ongoing payments, the Supreme Court, which upheld Ali’s ruling, 5-4, had little room to intervene.
The request for a preliminary injunction, however, is a bit more in depth. Successful plaintiffs must demonstrate to the court four things in seeking the ruling: First, that they are likely to succeed on the merits of the claim when it is heard later on; that the balance of equities tips in their favor; that the injunction is considered within the sphere of public interest; and finally, that they are ‘likely’ to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of court action.
This wider level of discretion granted to the district courts in a preliminary injunction ruling invites much more scrutiny, and more room for the government to appeal the ruling to higher courts should they see fit.
It’s a strategy both legal analysts and even Trump himself dangled as a likely possibility as they look to enforce some of their most sweeping policy actions.
Trump suggested this week that Boasberg, tasked with overseeing the escalating deportation fight, be impeached, describing him in a post on Truth Social as a ‘crooked’ judge and someone who, unlike himself, was not elected president.
‘He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!’ Trump said.
The post earned the rebuke of Chief Justice John Roberts, who noted that it broke with 200 years of established law. And on Thursday, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, James Blair, appeared to punt the issue to Congress.
He told Politico in an interview that Trump’s remarks were shining ‘a big old spotlight’ on what it views as a partisan decision, but noted impeaching a judge would be up to Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who he said would ultimately ‘figure out what can be passed or not’ in Congress.
‘That’s the speaker’s job. And I won’t speak for what the speaker’s opinion of that is,’ he said. ‘I think the thing that is important right now is the president is highlighting a critical issue.’
Vice President JD Vance took a shot at former Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting her alcohol habits were responsible for her ‘word salads.’
Vance’s remarks came as he described the difference between how he and Harris have handled the role as vice president, and he speculated about the relationship dynamic between Harris and former President Joe Biden.
‘Well, I don’t have four shots of vodka before every meeting,’ Vance said in an interview with radio host and Daily Caller editor Vince Coglianese in an interview that aired Thursday. ‘That’s one way I think that Kamala really tried to bring herself into the role, is these word salads. I think I would need the help of a lot of alcohol to answer a question the way that Kamala Harris answered questions.’
Vance then shared his suspicions that Harris and Biden didn’t have the same level of trust he and President Donald Trump share, noting his opinion was based on ‘guesswork’ since he doesn’t speak to either Biden or Harris frequently.
‘My sense is that there wasn’t a level of trust between Biden and Harris,’ Vance said. ‘She was just less empowered to do her job. Luckily, I’m in a situation where the president trusts me, where if he asks me to do something, he believes it’s going to happen. … I feel empowered in a way that I think a lot of vice presidents haven’t been, but that’s all in the service of accomplishing the president’s vision.’
Harris routinely faced scrutiny for comments in which she jumbled words, including when she said, ‘I grew up understanding the children of the community are the children of the community’ in September 2024.
Harris, who previously served as a senator from California, is now a speaker with CAA Speakers, which represents high-profile celebrities. CAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
A spokesperson for Vance confirmed the vice president made the remarks on the podcast but did not provide additional comment to Fox News Digital. Coglianese did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Meanwhile, Vance also poked fun at himself in the interview Thursday.
Vance, who has become the source of thousands of memes circulating the internet after the heated Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, said he finds the memes entertaining.
In particular, he said he enjoys one based off Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television from the 2019 film ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,’ and another swapping his face with members of the band Van Halen.
‘I’m a personal fan of Vance Halen, but that’s because I really like the band Van Halen,’ Vance said. ‘So that’s just my personal preferences. I don’t know how it happened or where it came from, but it’s been very, very funny to watch your own face become this meme. It’s made the job a lot more fun, so I encourage people to keep doing it.’
Fox News Digital’s Alexander Hall contributed to this report.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said wasteful spending is over as he signed a memo to cancel over $580 million in Department of Defense (DoD) contracts.
‘We’re back with another quick update on our efforts to cut wasteful spending and cut it quickly at the Department of Defense,’ Hegseth announced in a post on X.
‘Today, I’m signing a memo directing the termination of over $580 million in DoD contracts, in grants that do not match the priorities of this president or this department. In other words, they are not a good use of taxpayer dollars.’
Hegseth said that they owe Americans transparency, sharing details on some of the contracts and grants that have been canceled.
‘There’s an HR software effort that was supposed to take a year and cost $36 million, but instead it’s taken eight years and is currently $280 million over budget, not delivering what it was supposed to. So that’s 780% over budget. We’re not doing that anymore,’ Hegseth vowed.
Hegseth added that they uncovered another batch of DoD grants, totaling $360 million worth, that decarbonizing emissions from Navy ships – part of the Obama-Biden Green agenda.
‘That’s 6 million bucks, $5.2 million on something that would diversify and engage the Navy by engaging underrepresented Bipoc students and scholars. Another $9 million at a university to approach equitable AI and machine learning models. I need lethal machine learning model, not equitable machine learning models,’ Hegseth explained.
On this third point, Hegseth said Thursday’s other cuts included wasteful spending on external consulting services.
’30 million bucks in contracts with Gartner and McKinsey. That’s IT purchasing unused licenses. So when you add it all up, $580 million in DoD contracts and grants DOGE is helping us cut today,’ Hegseth said.
When added up all together, Hegseth said that over $800 million in wasteful spending has been canceled over the first few weeks, as DoD partners with DOGE ‘to make sure that our warfighters have what they need by cutting the waste, fraud, and abuse.’
‘They’re working hard. We’re working hard with them. We appreciate the work that they’re doing, and we have a lot more coming. So stay tuned,’ Hegseth said.
‘So, might as well not waste any more time right now, just sign this thing. How about that? So this makes it official. We’re going to keep going for you guys,’ Hegseth said while signing the orders.
‘Have we ever seen this level of transparency? Amazing, thank you @SecDef,’ Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., commented on Hegseth’s post.
Back in February, Hegseth committed to cooperating with DOGE to cut wasteful spending at the Department of Defense.
‘We will partner with them. It’s long overdue. The Defense Department’s got a huge budget, but it needs to be responsible,’ Hegseth previously told Fox News.
As of Thursday afternoon, 239 ‘wasteful’ contracts with a ‘ceiling value’ of $1.7 billion have been terminated over a two-day period, DOGE announced.
Fox News Digital’s Deirdre Heavey and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
Stepheny Price is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. She covers topics including missing persons, homicides, national crime cases, illegal immigration, and more. Story tips and ideas can be sent to stepheny.price@fox.com
TEMPE, Ariz. – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont – champions of the left – repeatedly targeted President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk as they kicked off a three-day swing through three electorally important western states.
But Sanders, and especially Ocasio-Cortez, also trained some of their fire on the Democratic Party, with the best-known member of the so-called ‘Squad’ of diverse and progressive House members urging her own party to have ‘the courage to brawl’ against Republicans.
Trump has been on a tear since returning to the White House two months ago, flexing his political muscles to expand presidential powers as he’s upended longstanding government policy and made major cuts to the federal workforce through a flurry of executive orders and actions.
And Sanders and Cortez took to the stage at their first stop in Las Vegas, Nevada, while Trump signed an executive order to begin the longstanding conservative goal of demolishing the Department of Education at a White House ceremony.
Ocasio-Cortez accused Trump and his GOP allies of ‘lying to and screwing over working and middle-class Americans so that they can steal our health care, social security and veterans benefits in order to pay for their tax cuts for the billionaires and bailouts for their crypto friends.’
And Sanders charged that ‘every day Trump is trying to take power away from Congress. He is trying to take power away from the judiciary.’
‘We have a message for Mr. Trump and that is, we will not allow you to move this country into an oligarchy,’ Sanders emphasized.’We’re not going to allow you and your friend Mr. Musk and the other billionaires to wreak havoc on this country.’
But the inability of Democrats in Congress, who are out of power in the White House as well as the House and Senate, to stop the majority Republicans is causing tensions within the party amid increasing calls for leaders to come up with a stronger strategy to resist Trump.
‘This isn’t just about Republicans,’ Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd in Arizona. ‘We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us. That means each and every one of us choosing and voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class…I want you to look at every level of office around and support Democrats who fight, because those are the ones who can actually win against Republicans.’
The Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez stops are drawing large crowds. The fire marshal in Tempe, Arizona said 11,300 packed the Mullett Arena on the campus of Arizona State University, with thousands in an overflow section outside the arena.
The tour, dubbed by Sanders as ‘Fighting Oligarchy,’ continues Friday in Denver and Greeley, Colorado and concludes Saturday with a rally in Tucson, Arizona.
It comes as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the chamber, is facing increasing fire from his own party for his support last week for a Republican-crafted federal funding bill that averted a government shutdown.
Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Sanders mentioned Schumer during their speeches in Las Vegas or Tempe.
And Sanders, an independent who has long caucused with the Democrats and who is part of Schumer’s leadership team in the Senate, declined in an interview with Fox News Digital ahead of the Tempe rally, to answer whether he agreed with calls for Schumer to step down from his leadership position.
‘That’s kind of inside the Beltway stuff,’ Sanders said.
But it was on the minds of some of those attending the rallies.
There were chants of ‘primary Chuck’ directed at Ocasio-Cortez at the Las Vegas rally.
And in Tempe, Cindy Garman and Pat Robinson, both of Prescott, Arizona, told Fox News that they were ‘really disappointed’ with Schumer’s move.
And Amanda Ratloff of Gilbert, Arizona, said Schumer ‘is not the leader we need right now. We need somebody that will actually fight back and fight for the American people and not just give in to Elon Musk and Donald Trump.’
Sanders, in his speech, vowed to fight.
‘We are going to fight Trump and his oligarchy friends,’ he emphasized. ‘From the bottom of my heart I am convinced that they can be defeated.’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed the negative impact from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, saying there won’t be any significant damage in the short run.
“We’ve got a lot of AI to build … AI is the foundation, the operating system of every industry going forward. … We are enthusiastic about building in America,” Huang said Wednesday in a CNBC “Squawk on the Street” interview. “Partners are working with us to bring manufacturing here. In the near term, the impact of tariffs won’t be meaningful.”
Trump has launched a new trade war by imposing tariffs against Washington’s three biggest trading partners, drawing immediate responses from Mexico, Canada and China. Recently, Trump said he would not change his mind about enacting sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” on other countries that put up trade barriers to U.S. goods. The White House said those tariffs are set to take effect April 2.
“We’re as enthusiastic about building in America as anybody,” Huang said. “We’ve been working with TSMC to get them ready for manufacturing chips here in the United States. We also have great partners like Foxconn and Wistron, who are working with us to bring manufacturing onshore, so long-term manufacturing onshore is going to be something very, very possible to do, and we’ll do it.”
Shares of Nvidia have fallen more than 20% from their record high reached in January. The stock suffered a massive sell-off earlier this year due to concerns sparked by Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek that companies could potentially get greater performance in AI on far-lower infrastructure costs. Huang has pushed back on that theory, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips.
Nvidia, which designs and manufactures graphics processing units that are essential to the AI boom, has been restricted from doing business in China due to export controls that were increased at the end of the Biden administration.
Huang previously said the company’s percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei.
Darden Restaurants on Thursday reported weaker-than-expected sales as Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse underperformed analysts’ projections.
Shares of the company were up in premarket trading.
Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
Darden reported fiscal third-quarter net income of $323.4 million, or $2.74 per share, up from $312.9 million, or $2.60 per share, a year earlier.
Excluding costs related to its acquisition of Chuy’s, Darden earned $2.80 per share.
Net sales rose 6.2% to $3.16 billion, fueled largely by the addition of Chuy’s restaurants to its portfolio.
Darden’s same-store sales rose 0.7%, less than the 1.7% increase expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount estimates.
Both Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, which are typically the two standouts of Darden’s portfolio, reported underwhelming same-store sales growth. Olive Garden’s same-store sales rose 0.6%. Analysts were anticipating same-store sales growth of 1.5%. And LongHorn’s same-store sales increased 2.6%, missing analysts’ expectations of 5% growth.
Darden’s fine dining segment, which includes The Capital Grille and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, reported same-store sales declines of 0.8%.
The last segment of Darden’s business, which includes Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen and Yard House, saw same-store sales shrink 0.4% in the quarter.
For the full year, Darden reiterated its forecast for revenue of $12.1 billion. It narrowed its outlook for adjusted earnings from continuing operations to a range of $9.45 to $9.52 per share. Its prior forecast was $9.40 to $9.60 per share.
Darden’s fiscal 2025 outlook includes Chuy’s results, but the Tex-Mex chain won’t be included in its same-store sales metrics until the fiscal fourth quarter in 2026.
A federal appeals court ruled that art created autonomously by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted, saying that at least initial human authorship is required for a copyright.
The ruling Tuesday upheld a decision by the U.S. Copyright Office denying computer scientist Stephen Thaler a copyright for the painting “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.”
The picture was created by Thaler’s AI platform, the “Creativity Machine.”
The “Copyright Office’s longstanding rule requiring a human author … does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence,” a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in its unanimous ruling.
“The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being — the person who created, operated, or use artificial intelligence — and not the machine itself,” the panel said.
The panel noted that the Copyright Office “has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence.”
Copyright grants intellectual property protection to original works, giving their owners exclusive rights to reproduce the works, sell the works, rent them and display them.
Tuesday’s ruling hinged on the fact that Thaler listed the “Creativity Machine” as the sole “author” of “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” when he submitted a registration application to the Copyright Office in 2018.
Thaler listed himself as the picture’s owner in the application.
Thaler told CNBC in an interview that the Creativity Machine created the painting “on its own” in 2012.
The machine “learned cumulatively, and I was the parent, and I was basically tutoring it,” Thaler said.
“It actually generated [the painting] on its own as it mediated,” said Thaler.
He said his AI machines are “sentients” and “self-determining.”
Thaler’s lawyer, Ryan Abbott, told CNBC in an interview said, “We do strongly disagree with the appeals court decision and plan to appeal it.”
Abbott said he would first ask the full judicial lineup of the Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. If that appeal is unsuccessful, Abbott could ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the issue.
The attorney said the case detailed “the first publicized rejection” by the Copyright Office “on the basis” of the claim that a work was created by AI.
That denial and the subsequent court rulings in the office’s favor, “creates a huge shadow on the creative community” he said, because “it’s not clear where the line is” delineating when a work created by or with the help of AI will be denied a copyright.
Despite the ruling, Abbott said he “was very pleased to see that the case has been successful in drawing public attention to these very important public policy issues.”
The Copyright Office first denied Thaler’s application in August 2019, saying, “We cannot register this work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.”
“According to your application this work was ’created autonomously by machine,” the office said at the time.
The office cited an 1884 ruling by the Supreme Court, which found that Congress had the right to extend copyright protection to a photograph, in that case one taken of the author Oscar Wilde.
The office later rejected two requests by Thaler for reconsideration of its decision.
After the second denial, in 2022, Thaler sued the office in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., seeking to reverse the decision.
District Court Judge Beryl Howell in August 2023 ruled in favor of the Copyright Office, writing, “Defendants are correct that human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.”
“Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright,” Howell wrote.
Thaler then appealed Howell’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In its decision Tuesday, the appeals panel wrote, “This case presents a question made salient by recent advances in artificial intelligence: Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976?”
“The use of artificial intelligence to produce original work is rapidly increasing across industries and creative fields,” the decision noted.
“Who — or what — the ‘author’ of such work is a question that implicates important property rights undergirding growth and creative innovation.”
The ruling noted that Thaler had argued that the Copyright Office’s human authorship requirement “is unconstitutional and unsupported by either statute or case law.”
Thaler also “claimed that judicial opinions ‘from the Gilded Age’ could not settle the question of whether computer generated works are copyrightable today,” the ruling noted.
But the appeals panel said that “authors are at the center of the Copyright Act,” and that “traditional tools of statutory interpretation show that within the meaning of the Copyright Act, ‘author’ refers only to human beings.”
The panel said that the Copyright Office “formally adopted the human authorship requirement in 1973.”
That was six years after the office noted in its annual report to Congress that, “as computer technology develops and becomes more sophisticated, difficult questions of authorship are emerging.”
Abbott, the attorney who represented Thaler in the appeal, told CNBC that the Copyright Act “never says” that “you need a human author at all for a work … or a named author.”
Abbott noted that corporations are granted copyrights, as are authors who are anonymous or pseudonymous.
Protecting a ‘beautiful picture’
The Copyright Office, in a statement to CNBC, said it “believes the court reached the correct result, affirming the Office’s registration decision and confirming that human authorship is required for copyright.”
Thaler said that he will continue to pursue his bid for a copyright for the painting.
“My personal goal is not to preserve the feeling of machines,” Thaler said. “It’s more to preserve, how should I say, orphaned intellectual property.”
“A machine creates a beautiful picture? There should be some protection for it,” Thaler said.
As women’s sports surge in popularity, professional leagues are increasingly touting the value of female athletes. New professional leagues like SailGP are launching with the advantage of building from the ground up, with gender diversity as part of their DNA.
Noncontact and noncollision sports are leading the way. Formula 1′s F1 Academy has created a pipeline for women into motorsports, with a goal of increasing female participation and representation on and off the racetrack. At the same time, it’s drawing a more diverse fanbase. Roughly 41% of F1 fans now are female, with women aged 16 to 24 years old making up the fastest-growing fan group, according to Nielsen Sports.
Professional male and female athletes are already competing alongside and against each other in the United Pickleball Association’s unified league, the Global Mixed Gender Basketball league and in SailGP, the international sailing league co-founded by Oracle founder Larry Ellison and champion yachtsman Russell Coutts.
Founded in 2018, the upstart sailing league involves 12 international teams racing on high-speed, 50-foot catamarans known as F50s. At speeds of more than 60 mph, SailGP is gaining a reputation as a sort of Formula 1 on the water.
“The whole goal is to train athletes to be capable of racing on an F50, which is one of the more complex boats in the world — maybe the most difficult boat to race in the world right now,” said Coutts, who is also SailGP’s chief executive officer.
The league didn’t set out with gender equity goals in mind, Coutts said, but simply sought to create the most compelling competition.
“We believe that male and female athletes can compete at the top of our sport against each other and with each other, so when we we saw that there was a difference in participation levels — and didn’t really see any logical reason for that — we took some steps to address that and we’ll take further steps in the future,” said Coutts.
To bridge the experience gap most female sailors face, SailGP created programs to draw and train talent. In December, its Women’s Performance Camp in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, marked its largest on-the-water women’s athlete training camp to date.
The league also requires each team to have at least one female athlete onboard during races and has set targets to have at least two female athletes per race crew in key positions within the next five years. Those key positions are the driver, who steers the boat; the strategist, who advises on tactics; the wing trimmer, who adjusts the 85- to 90-foot carbon-fiber wing sail; and the flight controller, who dictates how high or low the boat flies over the water.
The next SailGP races take place Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, the second in back-to-back U.S. weekend races.
SailGP has embedded inclusivity and sustainability into the competition via an Impact League that runs parallel to the on-the-water championship. Teams earn points for taking action to make sailing more accessible and to protect the environment in order to reach the podium. Winning teams earn cash prize donations to their partners. The Canadian team is in the lead in the Impact League thanks to its work to offer training opportunities, sailing camps and demo days to introduce foiling to new Canadian athletes.
“That changes the mindframe of very competitive people to care, and to compete, in a world of impact and sustainability as well,” said SailGP Chief Marketing Officer Leah Davis. “When you challenge the world’s most competitive people to be good at something else, they will turn their eyes to that pretty quickly, and in a pretty impactful way.”
Off the water, 43% of SailGP’s C-suite is female, up from just 14% in 2021. For comparison, 29% of C-suite roles at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, according to McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2024 report. The league last year introduced Apex Group’s accelerator program, aimed at increasing female representation at senior levels of the company.
It has also introduced initiatives to train more women on the operations, technology and boat-building side of the business. For example, SailGP Technologies based in Southampton, U.K., offers an apprenticeship training scheme — eight participants join the program each year, four male and four female. Today, 33% of directors at SailGP and 52% of heads of departments are female.
The overall business strategy is helping to grow the league’s appeal to a new set of fans. For the first time in its history, more than half of the ticket holders in attendance at last season’s New Zealand Championships in March were female, a trend that has held steady this season.
“This demographic has been underserved in sports,” said SailGP Chief Purpose Officer Fiona Morgan. “A huge part of our headroom in fans is young fans — and actually they’re female fans — who probably didn’t think about sailing, but they like extreme sports or sustainability, or they like sports that have gender equity at the heart.”
In June, Tommy Hilfiger was announced as the United States SailGP team’s official lifestyle apparel partner, joining brands such as Red Bull, Emirates, Mubadala, Rockwool and Deutsche Bank in sponsoring individual teams. In November, SailGP announced it had signed Rolex as its first title sponsor.
“I don’t think many brands nowadays will go into sponsorship that doesn’t have diversity or equity at some point in it,” said Morgan. “Their consumers and their investors will ensure they do that.”
In September, the league achieved a major milestone, announcing its first female driver. Two-time Olympic sailing champion Martine Grael joined for the 2024-25 season to skipper the new Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team, making history and immediately climbing the leaderboard.
After championships in Dubai, Auckland, New Zealand, Sydney and Los Angeles, teams from the UK, Australia and New Zealand are leading the league. Grael has steered her team ahead of the Germany SailGP team, and is proving competitive against the more experienced United States team.
“In the past — and still nowadays — you see a lot of people say, ‘Girls shouldn’t do that,’” Grael said. Her response is to call out that old way of thinking: “Shouldn’t do what?”
Grael credits much of her early success to familiarizing herself with the boats using SailGP’s simulator, developing muscle memory before even getting on the water. Unlike traditional boats built with male sailors in mind, SailGP’s modern foiling boats open opportunities for women in roles that do not require as much physical strength, she said. Knowing when to push a button and developing a good feel for the boat are equally important to the more physical functions, said Grael.
“Some guys have failed to understand that a girl is very much capable of doing the same role they’re doing,” she said.
Grael is among a number of top female athletes competing in key positions in SailGP — including Emirates Great Britain Team’s strategist Hannah Mills and the U.S. team’s Anna Weis — and says though women are still in the minority, things are changing.
Together with women competing in marquee races — like Switzerland’s Justine Mettraux, who took eighth place in the Vendée Globe single-handed, nonstop, nonassisted round-the-world race this year — they are carving a path for a new cohort of women to gain opportunities and make their mark.
“We have been less limited — I grew up never being told I shouldn’t do something,” said Grael. “There’s a big generation of others looking at us, and they’re going to come out strong.”