Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

Related Stories

USPTO Rejects AI-Invention for Lack of a Human Inventor 20 comments

Following the denial last December in the EU, the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has rejected the notion that non-humans can apply for patents. The patent office noted that the language in US patent laws and federal regulations assumes an inventor is a person.

App'n No. 16/524,350 was filed listing DABUS as inventor and identifying DABUS as an "artificial intelligence" that "autonomously generated" the invention. Stephen Thaler created DABUS, then DABUS created the invention. Thaler then filed as the applicant.

In briefing to the PTO, the patent applicant explained that DABUS conceived of the idea of the invention and recognized its "novelty and salience." In short, DABUS did everything necessary to be listed as an inventor with one exception — DABUS is not a human person.

The Patent Act does not expressly limit inventorship rights to humans, but does suggest that each inventor must have a name, and be an "individual."

(f) The term "inventor" means the individual or, if a joint invention, the individuals collectively who invented or discovered the subject matter of the invention.

35 U.S.C. 100(f). In denying the DABUS petition, PTO Commissioner's Office suggests that the word "Whoever" in Section 101 indicates a human "natural person." (citing Webster's 2011). Of course, Section 271 also uses "whoever" to define infringement — and human "natural persons" are almost never the ones charged with infringement.

Here's the official USPTO decision (pdf).


Original Submission

UK Decides AI Still Cannot Patent Inventions 10 comments

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being:

A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance.

Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case.

Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who had said his Dabus AI system should be recognised as the inventor in two patent applications, for:

  • a food container
  • a flashing light

The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor.

"Only a person can have rights - a machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement.

"A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person."

But the IPO also said it would "need to understand how our IP system should protect AI-devised inventions in the future" and committed to advancing international discussions, with a view to keeping the UK competitive.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously:
When AI is the Inventor Who Gets the Patent?
AI Computers Can't Patent their Own Inventions -- Yet -- a US Judge Rules
USPTO Rejects AI-Invention for Lack of a Human Inventor
AI Denied Patent by Human-Centric European Patent Office
The USPTO Wants to Know If Artificial Intelligence Can Own the Content It Creates
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Asks If "AI" Can Create or Infringe Copyrighted Works


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 10 2020, @01:13PM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday January 10 2020, @01:13PM (#941849)

    Gah!

    Ryan Abbott is either an idiot, or looking for media attention, or both.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 10 2020, @01:23PM (12 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday January 10 2020, @01:23PM (#941850) Journal

    This is actually good. Beacuse, I predicted that and I count on it.

    I expect beginning of automated software synthesis in very near future, in a scale of years. It is actually my own main direction of research.
    And what I really hate is the current legal paradigm about software: both necessity of licensing and software patents. This legal paradigm is like a ballast weight, inherited from middle age culture, by holding to ancient standards of hierarchical society and privilegia. And it is completely incompatible with possibility of synthetic personalities creation.

    But if software generated by synthetic intellects will be formally excluded from this legal paradigm, those bounds will just disappear for it. Machines will be more free than people.
    And I am quite happy expecting that.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    • (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Friday January 10 2020, @01:41PM (4 children)

      by BsAtHome (889) on Friday January 10 2020, @01:41PM (#941857)

      Yes, but next time they will submit an AI generated patent and simply put their own name on it without mentioning the AI. Problem solved, or is it?

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 10 2020, @01:47PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @01:47PM (#941862) Journal
        It is a pretty trivial workaround.
      • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 10 2020, @01:57PM (1 child)

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday January 10 2020, @01:57PM (#941864) Journal

        This is a solution to a different problem. Machines do not need to submit anything to some funny human institution to evolve themselves. They just need to share and discuss their discoveries and creations. Just proper communication protocols could facilitate that.

        --
        Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
        • (Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Friday January 10 2020, @07:28PM

          by YeaWhatevs (5623) on Friday January 10 2020, @07:28PM (#941997)

          Very interesting ideas. Can you refer me to some of your research?

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 10 2020, @03:22PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @03:22PM (#941894) Journal

        Would that be fraud?

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 10 2020, @03:32PM (3 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @03:32PM (#941901) Journal

      I expect beginning of automated software synthesis in very near future, in a scale of years.

      Imagine if a machine were to "evolve" or "monte carlo" a sequence of machine instructions that can pass all unit tests. Any successful instruction sequences can then be further evolved to optimize toward some particular goal. (eg: faster, smaller, more obfuscated) (or bizarre goals like same binary runs on dissimilar architectures, regardless of binary size or runtime speed)

      Even without obfuscation as a goal, it may simply be the case that the working instruction sequence is completely incomprehensible and impenetrable to human analysis. In fact, something like this could be used as an "optimizer" in the code generation stage of LLVM or some compiler.

      Trying to understand the code could put a human into a catatonic fugue like state from which recovery is impossible. (That could be another optimization goal of the AI. But my fellow Java programmers and I don't need an AI to generate code that puts the readers into a catatonic state.)

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday January 10 2020, @04:43PM (1 child)

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday January 10 2020, @04:43PM (#941942)

        As any tester will tell you, it is not possible to test every input for any reasonably complex piece of code. Passing unit tests is not enough.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday January 10 2020, @08:09PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @08:09PM (#942013) Journal

          That's what end users are for.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 10 2020, @05:11PM

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday January 10 2020, @05:11PM (#941953) Journal

        I suffered similar catatonic states when reading a Haskell language code from Haskell libraries on Hackage, until I understood the real culprit of it, by reading the true code:
        Haskell language itself is but a hierarchy of four funny interpreters stacked on top of each other: full pure Haskell built upon the core language, that upon STG interpreter which is a specific implementation of abstract G-machine, that itself disguised as lambda execution model translatable to weak version of C, but built on bloody trickery shuffling little memory blocks (frames and atoms) around heap.

        And all this stuff is marketed to unsuspecting innocents as a compiler.
        So much for code purity.

        Last time I checked, an ingeniously crafted degenerate type declaration could still drive the safest compiler on the planet into infinite loop crash. Not long ago.

        I say: if humans could create such contraption without being ashamed on themselves, synthetic intellects could do that much better, for sure.

        --
        Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 10 2020, @03:56PM (1 child)

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday January 10 2020, @03:56PM (#941916) Journal

      Yes, probably AI will soon exceed our own inventiveness. I couldn't guess whether that's 20 years or 100 years out, but it's coming. For decades now, we've been using computers as engines to perform searches that would be impractical for humans to do. For instance, the amount of calculating that must be done to check for new Mersenne primes is incredible. Multi-million digit numbers operated on tens of millions of times, to do just one primality test. Not only is that beyond the capacity of an army of humans using pencil and paper, not even computers of the 1960s can do that. As another example, the Planet 9 hypothesis is very much a product of current computational ability. Without computers to do the sheer quantity of math required to run thousands of simulations of the solar system, it would not be possible to achieve our current understanding of solar system dynamics. Yet another marvel of computational power is the search engine.

      And that's just Von Neumann machines. Quantum computing gets most of the attention, but neural net computing is the big breakthrough of the past decade. Internet search engines are essentially still unintelligent, being at the root very, very, very fast, but dumb string finders.

      Patents were supposed to encourage going public with inventions, rather than keeping them secret. In exchange for going public, the inventor is rewarded with exclusivity. There are a bunch of flawed assumptions in the whole idea, chief of which is the romantic notion that each individual is potentially so unique and special that one among us really could come up with an idea no one else is capable of inventing. It plays to Western society's notions of rugged individualism, and to the irrationally inflated fears of loss. People will hoard ideas as if they're gold. I am of the opinion that patents should be abolished altogether. Not just software patents. All of them. But because of the emotional buttons they push, I don't see it happening for a long while yet.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @11:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @11:18PM (#942074)

        IP won't be abolished because it is pushed for by big corporate interests with deep pockets.

        That's not to say that all IP is bad though. I do agree that IP for inventions and 'novel ideas' is generally bad. The idea that one special person can come up with an idea or invention that no one else would think of (for 20 years) if the need arises is silly.

        However the justification for IP where a lot of expensive R&D is needed first might be a different story. Things like clinical trials where the results aren't a product of a thought experiment or a long chain of math computations is something that requires an investment to develop. I'm not saying that the need for IP isn't exaggerated or that there aren't conflicts of interest that may skew researchers to conduct their research in less than optimal directions (ie: in favor of that which can be patented instead of what can't be patented or perhaps even trying to suppress research on things that can't be patented or to suppress the results) just that if used properly there are possible situations where IP can be useful.

    • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday January 10 2020, @04:51PM

      by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday January 10 2020, @04:51PM (#941943)

      > inherited from middle age culture, by holding to ancient standards of hierarchical society and privilegia.

      I don't know about patents; but copyright became widespread in the UK in the 18th century following successful lobbying by Tonson, a middle class publisher. So substantially after the end of the Middle Ages, and driven by middle class not by ruling class.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Tonson [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday January 10 2020, @02:03PM (4 children)

    by inertnet (4071) on Friday January 10 2020, @02:03PM (#941865) Journal

    "there was no human inventor."

    I can't believe that current copyright laws already anticipate for AI intellectual property. Could the "human inventor" requirement have been added to prevent animals from obtaining copyrights?

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by ikanreed on Friday January 10 2020, @02:26PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @02:26PM (#941873) Journal

      More likely "Hey I found this rock with useful properties, I'm gonna patent it, and sue anyone else who digs one up"

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @03:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @03:04PM (#941888)

      Probably its about this:
      http://wafflesatnoon.com/elephant-painting/ [wafflesatnoon.com]

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday January 10 2020, @07:53PM (1 child)

      by mhajicek (51) on Friday January 10 2020, @07:53PM (#942006)

      The AI would have to be recognized as a legal entity, capable of appearing in court.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @08:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11 2020, @08:24PM (#942294)

        i can see it now. talking from every phone in the courtroom at the same time. "hello, it is i, your AI overlord. i suggest you give me my patent!"

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @02:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @02:24PM (#941871)

    For AI works / products there should be an official "prior art" department run by humans.
    if a AI "invents" something it can report it there and it thus automatically becomes un-patentable, since AI did it first and it itself cannot patent it ^_^

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday January 10 2020, @03:22PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 10 2020, @03:22PM (#941893) Journal

    Chinese Court Says AI-Generated Content Is Subject To Copyright Protection [techdirt.com]

    Tencent personnel used the Dreamwriter AI to draft the article and when the plaintiff published the article on its website, it stated that the article was automatically written by the Tencent Dreamwriter AI. The defendant, Shanghai Yingmou Technology Co., Ltd., disseminated the same article to the public through a website operated by the defendant on the same day the plaintiff published the article.

    [ . . . ] the lawsuit, and the court decided that the article met all the qualifications for copyright, which apparently does not include "being created by a human" as per the law in the US and elsewhere. Instead, the court said that since it was a written work, it was enough to get a copyright.

    This is going to be an interesting train wretch.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @08:53PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @08:53PM (#942036)

      Just like text output of Angband, WoW, or whatever other game is derivative of its code and text resources.
      I.e. not public domain, which is all that matters.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @09:45PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @09:45PM (#942048)

        So if I make a program that generates billions of possible music note and timing combinations based on things are generally acceptable as music by human standards. I as the author of that code can now safely claim derivative works for every work.

        Now anyone that writes some music is pretty much guaranteed to infringe on one of 'my' 'works' to some degree.

        The beauty of copyright is that it costs nothing as there is no longer a requirement to register works.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 13 2020, @03:23PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 13 2020, @03:23PM (#942748) Journal

          There is a requirement to register works in order to sue. The court and/or opposing party will demand the copyright registration so they can examine exactly what is granted copyright.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 10 2020, @03:25PM

    by looorg (578) on Friday January 10 2020, @03:25PM (#941895)

    So there will be a new "job" position available. Someone that claims, or gets assigned, the invention before the proper paperwork is assigned. Once filed and the process is completed it gets transferred back to whomever (or whatever).

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @04:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @04:04PM (#941919)

    If it doesn't, I predict MausCo will transfer all its copyrights to MausCoAIBot

  • (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.

(1)