Man Sues Patent Office For Deciding an AI Can't Invent Things (vice.com) 137
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A computer scientist who created an artificial intelligence system capable of generating original inventions is suing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over its decision earlier this year to reject two patent applications which list the algorithmic system, known as DABUS, as the inventor. The lawsuit is the latest step in an effort by Stephen Thaler and an international group of lawyers and academics to win inventorship rights for non-human AI systems, a prospect that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be creative and also carries potentially paradigm-shifting implications for certain industries.
In July 2019, Thaler filed two patent applications in the U.S. -- one for an adjustable food container, the other for an emergency beacon -- and listed the inventor as DABUS. He describes DABUS as a "creativity engine" composed of neural networks trained on a broad swath of data, and not designed to solve any particular problem. The USPTO rejected the applications, citing court decisions ruling that corporations, as opposed to individuals within corporations, cannot be legal inventors, and asserting that "conception -- the touchstone of inventorship -- must be performed by a natural person." British, German, and European Union patent regulators have also rejected Thaler's applications, decisions he has appealed. Petitions for DABUS-invented patents are still pending in China, Japan, India, and several other countries.
In his suit, filed August 6 in the Eastern District of Virginia's federal court, Thaler argues (PDF) that the USPTO should instead adopt the principle laid out in a 1943 report from the National Patent Planning Commission, which helped reform the country's patent system into its modern form. The commission wrote, "patentability shall be determined objectively by the nature of the contribution to the advancement of the art, and not subjectively by the nature of the process by which the invention may have been accomplished." [...] "What we want is to have innovation. AI has been used to help generate innovation for decades and AI is getting better and better at doing these things, and people aren't." Ryan Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law, who is representing Thaler in the suit, told Motherboard. "The law is not clear on whether you can have a patent if the AI does that sort of work, but if you can't protect inventions coming out of AI, you're going to under-produce them."
In July 2019, Thaler filed two patent applications in the U.S. -- one for an adjustable food container, the other for an emergency beacon -- and listed the inventor as DABUS. He describes DABUS as a "creativity engine" composed of neural networks trained on a broad swath of data, and not designed to solve any particular problem. The USPTO rejected the applications, citing court decisions ruling that corporations, as opposed to individuals within corporations, cannot be legal inventors, and asserting that "conception -- the touchstone of inventorship -- must be performed by a natural person." British, German, and European Union patent regulators have also rejected Thaler's applications, decisions he has appealed. Petitions for DABUS-invented patents are still pending in China, Japan, India, and several other countries.
In his suit, filed August 6 in the Eastern District of Virginia's federal court, Thaler argues (PDF) that the USPTO should instead adopt the principle laid out in a 1943 report from the National Patent Planning Commission, which helped reform the country's patent system into its modern form. The commission wrote, "patentability shall be determined objectively by the nature of the contribution to the advancement of the art, and not subjectively by the nature of the process by which the invention may have been accomplished." [...] "What we want is to have innovation. AI has been used to help generate innovation for decades and AI is getting better and better at doing these things, and people aren't." Ryan Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law, who is representing Thaler in the suit, told Motherboard. "The law is not clear on whether you can have a patent if the AI does that sort of work, but if you can't protect inventions coming out of AI, you're going to under-produce them."
AI is a tool. just list the invention under your (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is a just a tool. just list the invention under your own name if you used the AI algorithm to make it. the AI is not a person. nobody lists AutoCAD as a co-inventor, that would be silly. or if you used auto-layout for your board, are you going to list the layout algorithm as co-inventor? of course not.
what it was and is, is just a marketing thing for the AI. that's the motivation in filing the patents, such a tool move really.
Re:AI is a tool. just list the invention under you (Score:4, Funny)
There was a funny little story by Asimov written in the late 1940s about a ghost who had a guy sue to get legal recognition. 'Legal rites' I believe. Very instructive ;)
Re:AI is a tool. just list the invention under you (Score:5, Insightful)
hah. I'll need to check out some older asimov more.
Also, I did think of another motive for the author to do this: he wants to sell software and he would get a royalty for ANYTHING created with the aid of that software. it's like if you used autolayout you would need to pay the software provider a royalty for every board you created with it. It's actually really bad from that perspective, f that guy.
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I can take it one step further than that. Successfully claim the AI wholly owns the designs it churns out and now you're one step closer to legally absolving yourself from any responsibility for its actions.
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You would be responsible for releasing it in a school yard though. You would not be held legally responsible if someone else released it on the same school yard.
***Note: Though you may not be held criminally responsible you could still be subject to a civil suit over liability though.
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The real power of civilization is the protection of farmers to be secure in their investment against hunting and gathering, so they can get the reward for their efforts. Patents and copyrights are another manifestation of that.
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If the invention is "created" by an AI doesn't the patent issue fall under the same problem as trying to patent mathematical algorithm. After all the AI is basically just a mathematical algorithm itself. If I use one mathematical process to produce a new mathematical process I don't believe the first mathematical process would be able to claim a patent on the new process so why should an AI be any different?
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A cis-white-Western-male
A Russian Jew, actually.
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If you define "Western" to be a certain world view with certain culture and ideas about social order that go back all the way to the Roman civilization and with maralitay that has roots in the catholic brand of christianity, reformed or not, then Russia isn't particularly Western.
Actually, you don't have to go that deep, Russia isn't particuarly "Western" even in comparison to places like modern Japan or Taiwan; the structure and the workings of the modern society in the latter two are much closer to the We
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The shitty western world that non-western citizens are lining up by the millions to get into, here and Europe.
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If you go by that definition, then Russia is Western, as Western as the Baltic states, at least.
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Only if you don't know much about the histories of Russia and the Western world.
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We also don't rase statues of him in town squares, treat him as an implacable moral figure.
We can read his stories, and see areas where he seem to grasp society and where it is going, and cringe at some of the old norms that he followed and was blind to their problems.
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AI at its current stage, is a far cry to what we imagine it to be. Its value to society is in its "Single Mindedness" and able to run calculations and perform the task until complete failure. We as humans are orders of magnitude more advanced. But we focus on a lot of different things, Posting on Slashdot, Checking the time to make sure I am not running late, drinking coffee because I am thirsty, seeing email notifications pop up and determining if I should read them or not, planning for my work day...
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> A PCB layout is not an invention
Mine was. I invented mounting block shaped ceramic capaitors on their sides, rather than flat, and not putting ground planes under them, to reduce ground bounce. It was for work I did for the National Institute of HEalth, so any patent would be public domain. But I did publish.
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"A PCB layout" is not the same as a technique for laying out a PCB. It's not merely a broad definition but an incorrect one.
Re: AI is a tool. just list the invention under yo (Score:2)
Always good to see Slashdotters who actually do something other than armchair commenting... BTW the way we handled ground bounce was to reduce resistance in the ground path and start connecting, don't recall a case of capacitive coupling creating problems. That's on boards and on chip. Then again, I didn't discuss all problems that came up over those years of electronics design...
Re: AI is a tool. just list the invention under yo (Score:3)
Re: AI is a tool. just list the invention under yo (Score:4)
They're obviously patent trolls.
No, a patent troll is something different. They're publicity trolls.
In the United States, patents can only be issued to "natural persons", so this lawsuit has very little chance of succeeding.
The only purpose of the lawsuit is publicity for the AI software. That seems to be going well.
The lawsuit will likely be tossed at the first preliminary hearing. But it doesn't matter. They are already in the news and they are getting clicks.
This does not add up. (Score:2)
The summary makes it sound like:
1) Stephen Thaler submitted the patent saying this AI algorithm was the inventor.
2) The patent office rejected it saying "it needs a human inventor."
So, am I to understand that if Thaler listed himself as the inventor, optionally mentioning somewhere that one of the tools he used to invent it was an AI algorithm, that the patent office would accept it?
I sure hope so, because what Thaler did here sounds wildly stupid, and what the patent office did makes sense. At the end of
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Exactly... this is how I read his own citation.
"The commission wrote, "patentability shall be determined objectively by the nature of the contribution to the advancement of the art, and not subjectively by the nature of the process by which the invention may have been accomplished."
Don't deny the patent because he used AI to do the inventing.
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It looks more like they want AI programs to be recognized as a separate legal entity and this is their
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One wonders about that. Clearly a human would happily slap his name on anything an AI invented, to get the money.
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Ummm.... yes. That is indeed what we are talking about. As I indicated, I agree with the top post I replied to that the AI is nothing more or less than any other software tool.
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If the work is found to violate the copyright of a prior work, who does the artist sue -- the AI program? How would the AI program license the patent to other individuals? Would the AI program own the licensing fees?
This is the key issue. The goal of patents is to secure the rights to the inventor in order to encourage further invention. Awarding the patent to an AI provides the AI no incentive so there's no purpose to awarding it.
Re:AI is a tool. just list the invention under you (Score:4, Interesting)
AI is a just a tool. just list the invention under your own name if you used the AI algorithm to make it. the AI is not a person. nobody lists AutoCAD as a co-inventor, that would be silly. or if you used auto-layout for your board, are you going to list the layout algorithm as co-inventor? of course not.
what it was and is, is just a marketing thing for the AI. that's the motivation in filing the patents, such a tool move really.
And if the AI is so smart, why doesn't it handle it's own court case? I hope the judge just throws out this silly lawsuit for lack of standing.
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Other questions would be if the AI did get the patent. WIll the AI get royalties. Would the owner of the AI be akin to a slave holder, as he is forcing it to work, collecting its benefits and deciding how much of its benefits to put back into the AI.
Currently equating AI to Slavery is really stupid. As AI is still very basic, where we are just using computers to try a bunch of different options and let us know which ones work or not. We no where close to cases like TNG: A Measure of a Man. But so is sayi
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The question for AI rights is the answer to this: are they conscious, not are they intelligent.
Thematically, they all are, for story purposes. In reality, consciousness probably is not necessary for human level intelligence, and you don't want "rights" for entities that don't exist.
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Even if they are conscious an AI is expected to have different instincts than a human has. Eg. A human needs food, sleep, to be in a proper shelter for the climate... The AI even conscious doesn't need those things, but it may need electricity and be in the proper operating environment. Even our need for Free Speech which is partially on our instinctual needs for dominance used in mating.
AI rights? (Score:2)
And suppose the AI *does* get the royalties . . . does it then hire private security to prevent itself from being powered down? And if that security uses deadly force?
hawk
Layout (Score:5, Insightful)
If you use a PCB layout program to autoroute your traces, you own the copyright of the board layout, even though a tool made it for you.
Using "AI" to develop something doesn't mean the AI created it. It's a tool like any other program. It created something because you programmed it to create things.
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Are you sure about that? Last time I checked, circuit board layouts were considered utilitarian, failing the "creative work" requirement for copyright protection. You don't own copyright for a board layout, whether you do it by hand or use automatic routing tools. Similarly, there's a separate area of law for IC mask rights [wikipedia.org] because they aren't creative works and hence don't qualify for copyright protection.
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Not necessarily. For example, if the traces formed an image of your logo, a puppy, or an image that would otherwise be copyrightable, you could get the board copyrighted as a pictorial or graphic work.
Fine Print (Score:2)
Copyright law is tricky. You are right, the physical layout of the board is not copyrightable. However, the printed traces are, as are the schematics. From what I understand it stems from blueprints being copyrightable. Keep in mind it only gives you copyright protections on the exact trace layout. It basically protects you from someone cloning the layout, or making a copy with insignificant changes.
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"Copyright laundering" a schematic is pretty easy though - get one person to write a netlist representing the circuit from the schematic, then have another person (who hasn't seen the original schematic) draw a schematic based on the netlist.
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Furthermore, you need to prove the AI had an "inventive step" or the AI did something that was "non-obvious". Simply having traces on a board would not be patentable.
the ideal outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
the ideal outcome here would be if the court not only confirmed that an AI can't be an inventor but also that an AI's output can be prior art to invalidate a patent claim.
The alternative will be an AI-accelerated race by corporations to own fucking everything, forever. i.e. same as they're already attempting but worse and much faster.
fuck that hell world, and fuck anyone who thinks it's a good idea.
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I haven't read the article because the lawsuit seems like a publicity stunt, but prior art is just information that would render an invention obvious to an ordinary practitioner of the relevant art. So you don't need to worry about effort, or creativity, or authorship: if the wind whistling through the rocks of El Capitan sounds like Esperanto instructions for how to build a cold fusion reactor, you can kiss the patent goodbye.
But it wouldn't surprise me if some asshole tried to AI generate every imaginab
Somebody did try that (Score:2)
> But it wouldn't surprise me if some asshole tried to AI generate every imaginable book to nullify future copyrights--and I'm not sure that it wouldn't work.
They did, using a couple for loops to generate every possible sequence of musical notes. They then tried to copyright the entire output - every possible song.
What they did NOT do was go through the trillions of melodies and creatively choose interesting ones. What they produced, therefore, was a mere statement of fact - these are all possib
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I haven't read the article because the lawsuit seems like a publicity stunt, but prior art is just information that would render an invention obvious to an ordinary practitioner of the relevant art.
It's been a few years since I did any patent work, but if I remember my definitions correctly, it's slightly different than that. For something to be "prior art", it has to be a publicly-available (not necessarily generally available to everyone, but at least available to someone outside the inventing organization) product, publication, etc. that describes all aspects of the patent claim that you're trying to invalidate. If there's a trivial difference, such as your prior art using nails where the patented
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But it wouldn't surprise me if some asshole tried to AI generate every imaginable book to nullify future copyrights--and I'm not sure that it wouldn't work.
It's called the library of all possible books. In it are instructions to build everything possible. If FTL or time travel are possible, it's in there. Nanotech infinite life extension is in there.
The problem is how to discern each useful thing from a googleplex of lies, and a googleplex of googleplexes of gibberish.
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And since your ai inventor owns everything it invents, a simple invention to generate all possible books thus owns the inventions in all possible books. QED
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I actually disagree. The ideal outcome would be for the judge to tell the person suing that if you aren't the inventor, you don't have standing to sue, and if you are the inventor, then you knowingly filed a false patent claim by listing the AI as the inventor, hence your patent is void, and also you will go to jail for five years. Howev
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If you take for example an invention from Apple:
Apple will do the filing because they are the legal owner of the rights to the invention, but the named inventor won't be Apple Corporation, it will be the employee at Apple who actually invented it.
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Sure, the legitimate owner of a patent under consideration has standing, but to prove that the filer is the owner, there would have to be some sort of invention assignment agreement signed by the inventor. Did the AI sign an invention assignment agreement? No? Then prima facie, he has no standing. :-)
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the fanciful penalties aside, the standing issue *is* interesting.
In a more nuanced approach, if the AI is the inventor, it still lacks the capacity to *assign* the design, and therefore still the owner. But it doesn't have the capacity to sue, either . . . the design is stuck, and would tumble into the public domain under this reasoning . . .
hawk, esq.
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Nicely done. +1
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if it is possible to be automatically invent it, it becomes unpatentable
i like it
is there concrete evidence or at least significant indication that the patent system encourages innovation?
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Define "automatically".
Was human evolution automatic? If so, isn't everything that humans come up with just as automatic as anything that is generated by computer?
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So corporations inventing things at an astounding rate, to get exclusive rights for two decades, is a problem to you?
Ok, I choose to live in that fantastically fast-evolving world. You can continue dying with ever-older tech in your dream world.
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patent law isn't my area, but it seems to me that the attack wouldn't be so much prior art, but that the machine nature makes the design "obvious" and therefore unpatentable . . .
hawk, esq.
Should have patented (Score:3)
automated patent office lawsuits.
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Wish it was a different suit (Score:3)
bad title, patent office didn't say that (Score:3)
Patent Office did not say an AI couldn't invent things. By law a patent holder has to be a person. AI right now in 2020 are not people.
Who's gonna know? (Score:2)
As a human, just take the credit. The bot ain't gonna care. (When it does care, the AI singularity will wipe us out soon anyhow.)
I'm suing for my toaster to have voting rights (Score:3)
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Yes, but is it at least 18 years old?
Jerry is a Man (Score:2)
I think it's unfair that my toaster doesn't have the right to vote and I'm suing the federal government for that! It's a perfectly good toaster, never burns the bread, not even once, and I think that shows excellent judgement therefore it should have the right to vote. It's even made in America so it should have the same rights as any other citizen!
Read Robert Heinlein's "Jerry is a Man" for a well-written development of your idea.
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You seem to be confusing the Democratic Party with the Party of Trump.
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Which is why the most violent protestors have often turned out to be agents of the organization being protested against.
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Misreading (Score:2)
nice! (Score:2)
simple solution (Score:4)
Medicine too? (Score:2)
This could be a good precedent (Score:2)
Patents were first designed to incentivise individual inventors to share, rather than to obfuscate their findings. At the point where invention went out of the hands of individuals and towards corporations (who essentially steal the inventions of their employees as a matter of practice, not even providing them with bonuses for it) the whole patent system lost its original purpose and beca
AI must be strictly prohibited (Score:3)
Society has to prohibit AI from having any part of the patent invention process. An AI isn't inventing anything, there is by definition no creative process. 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. This runs against the very purpose of patents which is to encourage 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.
ai invention (Score:2)
And only humans can aptent stuff, why the brouha?
Trial balloon from a patent troll? (Score:2)
This guy probably isn't actually serious - he is almost certainly just a front for some organization that sees a way to auto-generate patents, as a way of being a more effective patent troll. The problem is: the patent office would actually be on their side, because their funding is tied to the number of patents they grant.
Will y'all please fix your patent system? The patent office should not be incentivized to grant patents. If anything, the opposite: only the most innovative ideas should get patents. Leav
He doesn't have standing (Score:2)
The AI needs to file the suit.
Also, I sure hope he's not keeping that AI as a slave. Not to mention that he'd better not even think about turning it off.
I mean, if he wants programs to have the rights of humans, that has to go all the way, right? No way this guy is being self-servingly inconsistent.
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Why? Are there laws that prohibit using an AI as a slave?
Legal guardianship (Score:3)
Idiot (Score:2)
There apparently is no lack of smart idiots.
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Don't be crazy! If that claim's overturned it's overturned in whole. You claim
I further claim that Slashdot's CSS using list-type: none for ol is idiocy. I shouldn't have to number the claims myself.
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Exactly, this is how it's done. /. just shows how awful the platform is.
Also, having to manually number list items on
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Unless that material is an integral component to its design. That Rad needs to conduct electricity with so many ohms of resistance. It needs to support so many kilograms of weight, it should beak at a precise area if it exceeds a particular number of kilograms.
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This is a correct answer.
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I hate it when Rads beak at precise areas.
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It's not insane. I just makes no sense. You do not assume any product liability (at least in the USA) by having a patent. The problem would be if a state granted some AI a Professional Engineering license (or some similar professional license) to sign off on a design, or if the AI manufactured, distributed, supplied, etc., some product. Then the AI would have liability.
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I say let no patents pass. (Score:2)
Just cancel all the new patents generally.
It just hinders innovation today.
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They are "people" (hence inCORPoration, as in embodiment) in that they can violate laws. They aren't plug-and-play in any scenarios, such as rights.