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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
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Thursday July 07 2022, @09:20AM (4 children)
Some sensible news out of the UK?
Did hell freeze over or did Johnson finally leave?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 07 2022, @12:21PM (3 children)
He's apparently resigning today but he wants to stay on as PM until a replacement is elected by the Conservative Party. Go figure.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Thursday July 07 2022, @02:00PM (1 child)
Well, any government stays put until a replacement is in. What would you want to do if shit hits the fan, tell the shit to refrain from spreading 'til your government is able to act again?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday July 07 2022, @04:49PM
Often the party installs a caretaker PM in the interim. He has a deputy, Dominic Raab, who could do the job (allegedly).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Thursday July 07 2022, @05:55PM
Is done...
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-62072419 [bbc.com]
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday July 07 2022, @11:36AM (2 children)
It is bizarre I even have to keep pointing this out but - "AI" is just a tool, like any other software or hardware tool on a computer. The entire idea of assigning patent rights to an "AI" is so ridiculously absurd that whoever even proposed it should be laughed out of their job, and anyone who supported the idea needs mental help. You wouldn't assign patent rights to a screwdriver, a hammer, or a spreadsheet would you?
Chances are, they are trying to avoid dealing with who REALLY came up with the original work. There are two aspects to this - 1, there may be a large number of people with whatever organization who worked together and directly used the "AI" as a tool to create this patent. Obviously whatever organization doesn't want to give credit where credit is really due. But this should already be an addressed issue as there are many huge projects that involve large numbers of people. 2: The way "AI" works is it takes the original work of many others outside of the organization and randomly throws it at canvas infinitely fast until it finds something that works. So, how do you credit that when that database may include data from every single invention ever made? They really don't want to address that, as then they would have to address that the patent their magic "IA" bullshit spat out may not really be all that original.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 07 2022, @12:33PM
> You wouldn't assign patent rights to a screwdriver, a hammer, or a spreadsheet would you?
But what if it's a screwdriver in a black box with "Really high tech stuff" written on the outside? Then it can acquire patents right?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday July 08 2022, @09:36PM
And biological AIs (homo sapiens employees) are just tools too.
Laws are made up.
Rights are made up.
Patent laws and rights are made up.
It can be whatever we want them to be.
We can choose to define legal personhood however we want.
It can be DNA (possibly limited to sex and/or ethnicity as it has been historically) or some capacity of making decisions/sentience or something else entirely.
Any preconceptions you have are just that; they will die when you die.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with
it."
-- Max Planck
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday July 07 2022, @12:24PM (1 child)
The whole point of patents were that a human or company would be granted a temporary monopoly on their idea in order to have time to recoup their development costs. If a computer program, an AI, is just making things up by sifting through information, why should those things be patentable? It seems we now have machines that can do the work for very little cost to produce ideas that can benefit all of humanity.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 07 2022, @12:39PM
> making things up by sifting through information
Someone needs to write a "score function", i.e. some criteria that designates *this* as better than *that*. Computer algorithms can't do that.
Then one can get a computer to throw a whole load of initial conditions and determine the initial conditions that give the best score, where there are lots of different algorithms to determine how to iterate on the initial conditions (for example neural networks, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, newton-raphson, excel RANDOM function, etc etc).
The patent in this case goes to the person who can write a satisfactory score function and drive whatever optimisation routine to find a decent set of initial conditions. It is madness to ascribe a patent to the optimisation algorithm.