EU Patent Office Rejects Two Patent Applications in Which an AI Was Designated As the Inventor (techdirt.com) 39
Mike Masnick, writing for TechDirt: We've written a bunch about why AI generated artwork should not (and need not) have any copyright at all. The law says that copyright only applies to human creators. But what about patents? There has been a big debate about this in the patent space over the last year, mainly lead by AI developers who want to be able to secure patents on AI generated ideas. The patent offices in the EU and the US have been exploring the issue, and asking for feedback, while they plot out a strategy, but some AI folks decided to force the matter sooner. Over the summer they announced that they had filed for two patents in the EU for inventions that they claim were "invented" by an AI named DABUS without the assistance of a human inventor. And now, the EU Patent Office has rejected both patents, since they don't have a human inventor.
And IBM has the most patents in the US. (Score:2)
Simply because their policy is to file ALL the things.
But honestly, if you take off your propaganda and hate colored glasses, ... You're surprised that a country as populous as China has more patents than anyone else?
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Patents no longer have any correlation to innovation.
Mathematical formula, laws of nature (Score:2)
What if the AI creates a new mathematical formula and expects a patent?
Will the AI protest? Got on strike?
Call the AI union and shut down AI systems nation wide?
Call its designer and report a CoC problem due to its feelings about a patent rejection?
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Does this put the ideas into public domain? (Score:2)
Are the ideas or things that failed patent now available for all without restrictions?
Article links to abstracts (Score:2)
One is a food container and the other is titled 'Devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention'. Basically they are patenting online trolling, while online trolling. Meta-insanity. Welcome to 2020!
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AI patents must be killed with prejudice (Score:4, Insightful)
You have an AI that is set on inventing things. It can work work 24/7 creating new and iterative versions of things that qualify for patents. Since it is an AI it can be replicated onto additional servers again and again like a virus. Each AI creating patents and locking up a slice of IP for their owners.
Naturally these AI will be owned by patent trolls as that is the history of such things. We could readily end up in a situation where we are locked out of innovation. As the AI get better at doing their job they will lock up more and more IP for the patent troll masters. Society will become beholden to the patent trolls who will quickly turn their AI's loose upon every field they can.
AI's performing automated patent development need to be killed with prejudice before society bends to their master's knee.
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At the end of the day you have an attestation that it was performed by the human who did the work. If someone is committing fraud they would lose their patent and potentially face criminal prosecution.
If they are at some point it should become obvious simply due to the number of patents that were generated. If a person is really doing the work they would have the ability to show their work (notes etc.). An AI would generate at a volume that no human could ever match, especially as the AI technology matures.
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For example that is why in math tests, many teachers want to see the entire process. So if you only provide the result, you might not get full credit, since you might just as well have copied it from someone else.
You can interview the alleged inventor and ask them questions, perhaps questions that AI notoriously have problems with. The inventor ought to be able to offer unique insights in the process that led to the result.
If they can't answer the questions ab
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The process to own patents still costs money, so a troll can't really use an AI to "brute force" all ideas in a cost effective way. Its like someone could theoretically buy every domain name and "own" the internet, except there isn't enough money to do that.
Remove all existing patents than can be generated (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah duh. There is nu such thing as AI yet. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, your universal functions, based on weight matrix multiplication does not an intelligent being make.
How about impact mitigation? (Score:4, Interesting)
The level of protection offered should depend on effort: Perhaps we should allow AI-generated patents; However, the period of patent validity period shall be 6 months for Non-Human inventors, instead of the normal 20 years validity period, and the review of such patent applications should include review by an AI and occur over a specified length of time.
This would allow people interested in expanding the Public Domain and reducing frivolous patents to use AI to pre-generate possible patents, which would then prevent a human inventor making and claiming them later, since it would now be part of the prior art.
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Who gets the months of "patent" support?
The owner of the AI at that time and only the owner of the AI?
The AI and its owner?
I would say that anything which a program spits out is the property of
whomever ran that program.
In other words: the owner or lessee of the computation resources who
paid for and allocated that memory, computation time, etc, causing the execution of the AI program.
Anything produced by that program is an identifiable separate piece of property; there's no reason that
selling the program
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Does the new owner get an AI with all its own "patent" work?
The "owner" and the "inventor" of a patent are different things. I don't know if the inventor gets any rights at all. The "owner" does. So it does seem possible for the "inventor" to be an AI, or a monkey, or a minor; so long as the "owner" is a human being. This is not too unlike an employee at a company who invents something. The employees are the inventors, but the company owns the patent.
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The AI has to be in on the cash flow resulting from the work presented
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This would allow people interested in expanding the Public Domain and reducing frivolous patents to use AI to pre-generate possible patents, which would then prevent a human inventor making and claiming them later, since it would now be part of the prior art.
If that's your goal, you're actually making things more complicated than they currently are. Just publish the idea publicly without applying for a patent. Congratulations! Your AI's output is now publicly available prior art that can be used to invalidate any attempts at patenting the idea in the future. Simple as that.
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I don't know about other places, but the USPTO has the reputation of only looking in their own files to decide whether a patent has prior art.
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Their own files or those presented as challenge.
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Just publish the idea publicly without applying for a patent.
Nobody has any incentive to do that. The exclusivity rights of a patent are needed to provide an incentive to do that.
I am suggesting there SHOULD be an incentive, but the incentive should be proportionate to the amount of work, but 1 or 3 years should be ample, and it shouldn't include the right to tie up an invention for many years.
Also; if an invention that is not the design of a durable physical object or mechanism is Not valuable
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I disagree that the incentives aren't there. Earlier, you yourself mentioned some when you said, "This would allow people interested in expanding the Public Domain and reducing frivolous patents [...]". Those are incentives, and they and others like them are already working.
What we're talking about here bears a lot of similarity to what drives the open source software community, specifically the FOSS part of it. While I haven't drunk the FOSS Kool-Aid, it's undeniable that the FOSS movement has seen a huge
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Seems like 'prior art' would already allow the use of AI-generated content to invalidate patents. I'm not a lawyer, but if an organization creates a structure of published 'obvious enough for 2020-era AI to create' ideas, that is no different than publication of human-generated ideas without patent. It's evidence that the creator didn't generate a novel idea, and thus shouldn't be able to trade publication of that (already-published) "invention" for NN years of control over it.
EPO is not EU, out of (parliamentary) control (Score:2)
Please correct your article, EPO is not EU.
It is not an European Union (EU) institution, it is an international organization.
It is going fully rogue at the moment.
EPO is the "European Patent Office", not the Patent Office of the European Union, which does not exist.
My pocket calculator (Score:2)
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That's what I thought too: the inventor has to be someone who can hold property, has rights, etc. But as I think about it, the inventor of a patent is different from the owner of the patent. The owner is the one who has the rights to buy/sell the patent. I'm not sure what the "inventor" is for or what rights they have. So maybe it could be a pocket calculator.
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AI is a tool, not an owner (Score:1)
What is a patent, anyway? (Score:2)
A patent gives the inventor the right to sue others who copy or independently develop technology using the patented idea.
So is AI going to sue over infringement? If it does, who gets the money? AI? Or the owner of the AI? If the AI has standing to sue, then are we committing slavery by owning AI?
You can't have it both ways. If AI is a "human," then it should have human rights, and you shouldn't be able to own it.
This is such nonsense.
Depends (Score:2)
If I spend six months to build an AI to help optimize a specific design, it makes sense to be able to patent that design. And even maybe the AI too.
However if I were to build a random things generator, which happens to stumble upon something interesting, there might not be a valid case for a patent.
The difference is whether the AI is your assistant, or just spewing things by itself.
Solution in search of a problem. (Score:1)
This isn't hard. Someone set up that AI system. Whoever set up that system is the intrinsic inventor.
Instead of being the first guy to get an AI as the patent creator, just use the good old method.