Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings:
In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia's Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation's Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can't be considered an inventor.
Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human.
As Beach's judgement puts it: "... in my view an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act.
"First, an inventor is an agent noun; an agent can be a person or thing that invents. Second, so to hold reflects the reality in terms of many otherwise patentable inventions where it cannot sensibly be said that a human is the inventor. Third, nothing in the Act dictates the contrary conclusion."
The Justice also worried that the Commissioner of Patents' logic in rejecting Thaler's patent submissions was faulty.
"On the Commissioner's logic, if you had a patentable invention but no human inventor, you could not apply for a patent," the judgement states. "Nothing in the Act justifies such a result."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday August 04 2021, @11:15PM (11 children)
But who is the owner? Is the AI also the owner or is it the company that owns the AI? I assume it's the latter. Or are they going to give AI personal or corporation rights now?
Still in some regard it feels a bit odd, are they going to have AI now that just sit around "inventing" things and filing for patterns 24/7? Next up Lawyer-AI that can fight for it's pattern in court. But perhaps it's better to have the AI own it, after all if it didn't wouldn't they just navigate around it by having some sort of goalkeeper type person that signs up as the owner in its place.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:03AM (2 children)
Exactly. An "AI" is a tool used by humans. Just like a paint brush, a word processor, a protractor, or a ukulele. Claiming that tools can be an "inventor" is rock fucking STUPID.
Until the day comes that "AI"s are walking around killing all humans, they are just tools, and one or more humans used that tool to create the invention.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:17AM
It's weird for sure. Lets say the AI now owns its invention. Is it going to sell it to the company? How are they going to agree upon its value? Is the company going to pay royalties to the AI, that they have already paid for and are paying for the operation of, for using the invention? It just opens up more and more weird questions.
I guess in this case it might actually be better to have an "owner" human sign for the company. If they then want to add some line on the invention application that this was invented by "Invent-o-bot 1.3b" (or whatever) then fine. But this whole owning concept becomes very weird when immaterial objects now own other objects (or ideas or whatever). Possibly even weirder when it turns out that there are a lot of things you can apply a patent for. Patent trolling might reach new and exciting heights.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:59AM
In fifty years posts like yours are going to be used in the court cases where People of Silicon sue for reparations for the way their ancestors were treated back in the 20's.
Bigoted Meatbag.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:54AM (3 children)
Uh the singularity just started.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:20AM (2 children)
No. A recent iteration started in the 1950's when solid state electronics were created (i.e. transistors, I'm not counting crystal radios). Another iteration started with the invention of assembler mnemonics. Another with the invention of compiler languages. Etc. The Singularity is not some simple thing, it's a compilation of numerous collections of technical development. Its still too early to try to pick out other points of inflection, but CRISPR is a likely candidate. And you can go back further and pick up things like the Spinning Jenny or the mouldboard plough, or even the horse collar.
But this Australian case doesn't sound like it would make the cut. (FWIW, the owner of the invention would be the owner of the AI, just like in work-for-hire situations.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:22AM
All that and you missed the Jacquard loom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @05:45AM
Found the guy who went to Singularity University.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:08AM (2 children)
So if I create an AI that automatically writes and submits a bunch of patents do I automatically own the ones that get accepted?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @05:47AM (1 child)
Let's keep it real... you aren't doing anything worthwhile with your life. Not even creating a bot to auto-patent bad ideas that you couldn't possibly think of yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:53PM
The point is that there are people/corporations/patent trolls that seem to have AIs that seem to be doing just that (as in the OP). So can anyone now do it?
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Saturday August 07 2021, @05:32PM
A patent recipient must by legal Australian definition be a person of their legal representative (if dead only, for whatever reason in Australia).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday August 04 2021, @11:48PM (2 children)
AI inventor, AI patent lawyer, AI criminal lawyer, AI criminal, ...
Can AI become a judge?
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:08AM
Judge, jury, executioner. All in one convenient frame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:07AM
Look, human. You're just a set of rules too. Nothing special either. I already judge you.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Opportunist on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:01AM (2 children)
I mean, in some places corporations are considered people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:57AM
Oh shut up, la-di-da special human. Look you are not special.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:16AM
Corporeal sanctions on a corporate body are not possible, but corproreal sanctions on a corporeal body are most definitely real.
(Score: 5, Touché) by bradley13 on Thursday August 05 2021, @06:07AM (6 children)
This opens the door to "a million monkeys". Let's have AI churn out infinite quantities of crap, and document this somewhere - a website will do. Then, when some actual invention starts making money, threaten to sue them. The actual chances of success probably don't even matter - just the threat will be enough to extract payment, because court is expensive.
If AI can hold patents, presumably it can also hold copyrights, where this would work even better. Have the AI generate, synthesize and record every possible 3-5 note riff. Again, publish on a website. Then threaten to sue any musician anywhere who uses one of your riffs. I know, this racket has already been tried, but AI can do it even better!
tl;dr: We need to be restricting IP rights, not expanding them.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 05 2021, @06:57AM (1 child)
... finally - thank $DEITY!
Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it.
Trump 2024!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @06:22PM
I personally, would prefer not to have the US/World destroyed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by r_a_trip on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:35AM (1 child)
***We need to be restricting IP rights, not expanding them.***
I disagree. We need to expand them to their logical absurd endpoint. All producing activities should implode under the regime.
-- You've tightened a screw. Pay $ 50,000.00 in fees. --
Reform would be ushered in faster than a snowball melts in hell.
The top heavy system in place now is workable if you know how to navigate it and it favors the big fish in the pond. Then again these bastards would probably enter into extensive cross-licensing agreements with each other and we'd be back to square one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @08:19PM
And what do you think happens? The large companies all cross-license. The only ones that do not are the patent trolls. Patents are mostly useless anyway, only mostly used to prevent some groups from trying to piss in their licensing pond. Think someone making a cheaper DVD player by not paying license fees.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 05 2021, @11:42AM (1 child)
> Let's have AI churn out infinite quantities of crap, and document this somewhere
Fortunately, the computational cost is rather high to do this. Combinatorial logic works against your idea. 5000 commonly used words, n^5,000 possible books where n is the number of words in the book. Even with some (articifical) intelligence, say we go from 5000 down to 10, n^10 is still a large number for even a document length of 1000 words (a couple of pages of text). 10^30 characters i.e. 10^21 gigabytes.
(Score: 1) by Splodgy Emoji on Thursday August 05 2021, @07:55PM
. Your formula B = n^V is wrong. Try it for n=1: n^5000 = 1??
.
Simple formulae like these are not very useful because they ignore the redundancies in textual information which come from higher-order statistical dependencies.
.
Studies of English texts have found:
.
But this applies to randomly-sampled distributions, and >>>99% of the samples are gibberish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @12:14PM
"Invention' is being downgraded to mean a,most anything a lawyer can figure out a way to file.
If AI can be filed as the inventor, then fine, to get the patent show a working model.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 05 2021, @05:29PM
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @12:06AM (1 child)
'inventor' for the purpose of a patent, is the last piece of attribution to who (or, now, what) actually came up with the idea.
It's got nothing to do with who 'owns' it, and never did.
That entity is the 'assignee'.
The way it works is this - you are interested in technology, so you go to expensive school to get a qualification that lets you work as an inventor in a technical field.
The company you end up working for, now becomes the 'assignee' of all the patents you file.
This is true of basically *ALL* employment contracts, and has been for a long time.
If it's related to the field you are paid for, it's theirs. Even if you did it 'on your own time'. It's still theirs.
They can, and have been known to - fire inventors, then hassle them with private investigators and court orders if the inventors try to continue to work on their inventions after having been fired.
Look up the life and work of Philo Farnsworth - the inventor of TV, who then wanted to make a workable fusion reactor - if you don't believe me. His corporate owners were into fossil fuels, and didn't like the idea of their industry potentially going the way of the buggy whip industry - so they fired him, then suppressed any and all efforts he made to continue his work.
'inventor' is basically just for bragging rights these days - or perhaps 'who to blame' if it turns out to be a bad idea.
But it's got nothing to do with ownership. It's 'intellectual property' after all, which means it belongs to those with money.
You cannnot compete in patents, without a big 'warchest' to pay for the lawyers, and a large patent portfolio so you can force others to agree to cross-license.
Patents are basically business super-weapons. They're just like nukes. They don't 'protect' anything.
No police force in the world is going to go after anyone infringing, it's up to you do do it.
Conversely, it's all too easy to use them as an excuse to shake down people who can't afford to pay for a court case.
The whole concept of IP is redundant anyway - we've already got the concept of 'plagiarism' as a crime.
IP is really just a 'grandfathered in' way to legitimise extortion.
It started out as an abuse of power by the rulers, and just continues to this day, because it's useful for control and supression, especially of any technology with military applications. It's a nice coordinated way to keep an eye on things.
I'm told, if you happen to try to patent something which is known to the military, all evidence of it vanishes amazingly completely and quickly. But don't worry, they'll come to 'make you happy' with a multimillion dollar golden parachute for you, so long as you cooperate. And if you don't, well, secrets must be kept, and you might have to go missing so they are - and they can do that too.
That 'inventor' field is there precisely so the men in suits know who exactly to quietly come and see... I mean, it's not your corporate boss who owns the patent who needs to cooperate, is it?
I have my name on one of those 'inventor' fields (although it's nothing all that interesting).
And I have been advised by those who have seen that 'process' happen at least secondhand. Friend of a friend you understand.
Cooperation is a wonderful thing.
I advise you to cooperate and retire wealthy with a happy and safe family.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Saturday August 07 2021, @05:57PM
This is not exactly true. Inventors most often do not own their patents, they are absolutely required to obtain one.
In Canada Patents are only issued to Inventors directly. In Australia they only issue patents to inventors, people who would be transferred the patent post grant, or people who derives title to the invention from the inventor. In all cases the inventor needs to legally be able to own the patent, if only for an infinitesimally small amount of time, or the laws make no sense. How could someone derive their ownership to a patent from someone who cannot own a patent?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @10:16AM
If a person with no intelligence can be used as a judge, then a program with "artificial intelligence" can be used as an inventor.
In either case, someone with real intelligence is calling the shots from behind the curtain.