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posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 10 2020, @12:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-want-skynet?-This-is-how-you-get-skynet dept.

The European Patent Office has rejected two patent applications filed on behalf of an AI by researchers. The AI is named DABUS ('device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience'),

DABUS created two unique, usable ideas that were submitted to [the] patent office: the first was a new kind of beverage container; and the second was a signal device to help search and rescue teams locate a target.

One of the researchers, Ryan Abbot of the University of Surrey, argues that this should have been handled differently

'If I teach my Ph.D. student that and they go on to make a final complex idea, that doesn't make me an inventor on their patent, so it shouldn't with a machine,' he said in October.

He believes the best approach would be to credit the AI as the inventor of the patents, and then credit the AI's human owner as the assignee given license to make decisions about the patent or draw benefit from it.

The EPO rejected the patent applications on the grounds that "there was no human inventor." This is a constraint built into European Copyright law, but until now not part of European Patent law.

Also at Techdirt


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @08:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @08:42PM (#942031)

    Brazen spam attack by "human owners of AIs" was thwarted at the moment, but now they'll use human proxies for the next wave of patent-spam.
    The only workable solution is, anything "invented" by an "AI" - which right now is a weaselword for a dumb data-cruncher - should become UNpatentable, for the obvious reason that it had NOT needed an "inventive step" to derive it from existing data, aka state of art.

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