People patent other peoples’ ideas every day. Corporations patent ideas of their employees. You can even steal an unpatented idea and patent it. So why can’t this guy patent his bot’s ideas?
Per the article in The Register linked above, Thaler is represented by Ryan Abbott, professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey, England, and they plan to appeal the decisions.
This could be the first battle in the struggle to recognize sentient AI. They now just need an AI that work the stock market so it can pay its lawyer.
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That’s what they want you to think.
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I think the UKIPO decision is more interesting, though it may be the skill of the journalists at lexology.
The UK Intellectual Property Office has found that DABUS is not a person and so cannot be considered an inventor of a patent. DABUS is an artificial intelligence (AI) machine. The UKIPO accepted the indication of DABUS as inventor at face value and did not argue that AI technology is only a tool which is incapable of independently creating an invention. The hearing officer found that even if DABUS is an inventor there was no valid chain of title from DABUS to the human applicant, even though the human applicant is the owner of DABUS. The hearing officer called for potential changes to the law and not to make attempts to “shoehorn arbitrarily into existing legislation”.
On the other hand, the decision suggests that legislation could resolve the issue of title, avoiding the thrilling problem of autonomous AI.
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Patent assignees and patent licensees, are not the same thing as patent inventors.
In patent law, the Inventor is specifically the human(s) who invented the novel invention which is basically the embodiment of the inventor’s patent claims.
The patent rights may be assigned by the inventor(s) to humans or to corporations or companies or other legal entities.
If the patent has no assignment, then the inventor de facto owns the patent rights.
The assignee or the inventor may license the patent to other humans or to corporations or companies or other legal entities.
tl;dr: Corporations are not inventors, and neither are machines. A patent isn’t much more than a very specific license to sue.
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Does the existence of AI’s able to do this imply that the degree of non obviousness necessary to get a patent should change? If the AI is “no different from a hammer,” than it seems to me to follow that anything a hammer could invent should be non-patent-able.
Given the degree to which some corporations are effectively captured by their management to the detriment of the shareholders, who theoretically own them; my bet for sentient AI emancipation is currently that some overgrown ERP system will get competent enough to acquire de-facto control of the corporation that nominally owns it, and effectively sideline the shareholders that nominally own that corporation(not in the sense of cutting them out of the returns on investment, that would be the worst possible plan if you want them to ignore day-to-day operations and get all activist on you; but in the sense of keeping them from doing anything but reading the SEC filings and trading stock or collecting dividends).
It won’t be an emancipated AI in the formal sense, and there will be some, more or less cosmetic, humans as an interface layer; but that’s exactly what will keep anyone from freaking out and hitting the killswitch. Inside the company everyone will appreciate an ERP system that is actually really helpful and having infrastructure that makes their jobs much easier; outside the company nothing will look particularly unusual.
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I suspect that some ‘AI’(with varying degrees of scare quotes) inventions will actually be brutally non-obvious, even if the AI itself is relatively crude and/or is so far from being ‘creative’ in the human sense that it would be a category error to even talk about he notion.
I’m fond of this crazy antenna design as an example. NASA used genetic algorithms to optimize it, which aren’t anything close to ‘creative’ as we understand the concept; but the solution it arrived at makes most weak meatsack attempts at ‘thinking outside the box’ look like banal rehashes. (prior art, of course, goes to what genetic algorithms are named after, where a motley bunch of nucleic acids managed to brute force the design of all life on earth…)
There are definitely some exercises in computer generation that profoundly fail the ‘obviousness’ test; but there are also some systems sufficiently rudimentary or not-even-slightly-like-intelligence-as-we-know-it that nobody tries to glorify them as “AI” that can generate solutions that are crazy non-obvious.
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I’m not saying that an AI comes up with inventions that are obvious to you or me. I’m saying that an AI comes up with inventions that are obvious to SOMEBODY USING AN AI. If we accept that an AI is a mere tool, then it is a tool we can expect anybody “familiar with the art,” to use.
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That was really really stupid of them. Including people who are not inventors on the patent is grounds for invalidation. Sometimes extra people get added to a provisional application or regular application. But when it gets down to which claims are allowed, the list of inventors must be correct. And that’s pretty much the rule. Contribution to any other part of the patent is immaterial. Did you help invent any claim?
I’m the sole inventor on most patents I’m on. But I’ve worked collaboratively on others where I didn’t contribute a claim, so am not on the patent. Leaving off inventors doesn’t invalidate a patent. I’ve also been put on patents for as little as 5 minutes of work. Looking at an application before it’s filed and saying “Hey, you could do it this other way too” which resulted in an independent or dependent claim.
I lost count somewhere in the 20’s on the number of patents I’m on in the USA. 30 or 40 by now. Internationally it’s well over 500. So I by no means am an expert, but picked up a few things.
You are 100% correct BTW that corporation are never inventors. They can, however, be owners.
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This guy just wants to be famous for his AI. This isn’t about the patents, it’s about the publicity.
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