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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: 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.