10 ms·
Patent Act requires an inventor to be a natural person, not an AI [pdf]
- an1sotropy 4y agoSkynet is annoyed but undeterred :) This short news article [1] points out that Stephen Thaler [2,3] is also trying to show that AIs can hold copyright, which I think is an even worse idea than AIs holding patents. [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/only-humans-not-ai-qualify-as-inventors-federal-circuit-rules https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/only-humans-not-ai... [2] https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS
- cwillu 4y agoIt's not very far from a corporation holding a copyright to an algorithm holding one.
- leeter 4y agoEh... this just means that the AI has to get a useful idiot to hold them instead. Don't worry System Shock is just a game... right?
- kube-system 4y agoYes it is, because one has humans and the other one doesn’t. It’s the human part that is the significant differentiator. Corporations are a group of people working together for a common goal. “AI”s are made up of zero humans. It makes sense that a corporation can own something, because that is just a legal proxy for humans owning it. It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
- trasz 4y agoWhat is a human though? Corporations aren’t all humans, there are also machines there, buildings, vehicles, custom software… If it’s “any of it is human”, how about AI cooperating with a human? Or perhaps connected to a human brain? But does it have to be a brain? What if it’s, say, a human appendix? It would fulfill the same role it does in humans. EDIT: Some people apparently don’t realize that to corporations, humans are just another asset, like buildings or software. And they get replaced much more often than buildings and some machines. Corporations aren’t humans - they use humans. You could argue it’s usually humans who makes decisions - however, 1. Not always and you can’t tell from outside; 2. Even when it’s humans, they are based on data prepared by a machine; and 3. Even law handles consequences of those decisions differently from decisions made by humans for themselves.
- kube-system 4y ago> EDIT: Some people apparently don’t realize that to corporations, humans are just another asset, like buildings or software. Figuratively, maybe. Legally, no. This conversation is about specific legal terms, so figurative usages do not apply.
- trasz 4y agoLegally too, which I’ve demonstrated in the comment above. Sure, you can’t, say, buy humans, only lease them, but it’s the same with many other assets, from Technicolor cameras to land in many cases.
- kube-system 4y agoNo, in the 21st century, employment and labor law is wholly different than property law. The only way they can be equated is if you make generalizations so broad and metaphorical as to be legally meaningless.
- trasz 4y agoThe law that regulates IP is also wholly different from other kinds of property. Same about owned land.
- tsimionescu 4y agoA corporation is made up entirely and exclusively of humans. Machines, buildings, vehicles, software - these are no more part of the corporation than your own car or phone is a part of you. The legal definition of a person is very clear. Even the logical definition is actually quite clear: anything that can possibly exercise most of the rights of a human in a meaningful way can be considered a person. Can a horse own a piece of land in the same sense that a human does? Not really, as a horse simply can't exercise the right to sue someone who would infringe on its property rights even if it were granted one. Sure, a small child or an adult in a coma may be in a similar situation, but the child may eventually grow up and become able to exercise such a right, and the adult may eventually wake up from that coma. A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far farther from being able to recognize and exercise any human-like rights than the horse is, in fact. So it's even more absurd to assign copyright to a machine than to an animal.
- ben_w 4y agoNow I have a mental image of a corporation whose sole purpose is to be the legal person for an AI. > It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything. Current AI might be that. I don't know when AI will end up with a rich inner world of experiences, but I bet it won't be the exact same moment the law recognises it as such. I'd go even further: even if it somehow becomes possible to prove absolutely that some AI is sentient (which would be a remarkable development in the philosophy of mind), I'm fairly sure people will argue against such a proposition at least a decade after an AI passes such a test.
- kube-system 4y agoAIs will never have human or natural rights, because they are inherently neither. We don’t give people rights because they demonstrate intelligence, we give them rights because they are human.
- munk-a 4y agoAre there cities in the world where some pets are well fed but some humans starve? Humans are quite capable of elevating non-humans above humans.
- kube-system 4y agoI don’t think there’s any place in the world with a perfect human rights record. That doesn’t mean human rights don’t exist, or that they apply to other things.
- ben_w 4y agoHuman rights are a nice thing, but they are not a natural thing. What we grant to each other, we could (and might) grant to inorganic minds we may one day create.
- kube-system 4y agoIf there's an argument for AI rights unrelated to natural or human rights, then certainly, any comparison to human or natural intelligence is an irrelevant supporting argument, no?
- egypturnash 4y agoCorporations are slow AIs running on bureaucracy and humans.
- an1sotropy 4y agoBut isn't that what it means to incorporate - the business becomes a legally corporeal thing like a person? I think "corporations are people too" is a bummer, but that's a different fight. For me the issue with recognizing that AIs can have copyright is the difference in how they are bestowed. IANAL, but you actually have copyright on an expression of something the moment it is expressed, even without any slow legal paperwork, whereas patents only mean something once the patent is officially reviewed granted, no? So the unbounded rate of AI's expressing all plausible content (a thousand monkeys but much smarter) and thus preemptively stopping humans from getting copyright on it, seems especially awful.
- homonculus1 4y agoYes it is, you are just conflating ownership and creation. Intellectual property exists to provide a bargaining framework for human creators, there's no reason that joint ownership of it need imply that mechanically-generated combinations should also be included.
- tsimionescu 4y agoThere is a huge gap, and obviously so. Imegine the courts were to recognize some algorithm as the legal owner of a copyrighted work. What exactly would that mean? If someone were to reproduce that work, how would they seek approval from the algorithm? If they don't, how would the algorithm sue them? If it did and won, how would they pay restorations? Would any copy of the algorithm hold the copyright of that work, or only a particular one? If all copies do, and you infringed their copyright and had to pay damages, how much damages would each copy of the algorithm receive? The concept of an algorithm holding copyright or a patent or nay other kind of right over something is in fact logically incoherent if you examine it even slightly. Now, if in the future there would be some form of advanced AGI that does have the ability to understand and use such rights, the situation may change. But nothing that exists today comes anywhere close.
- Dylan16807 4y agoThe corporation has to buy it from a human. The critical difference isn't holding a copyright, it's making a copyrighted work.
- mistrial9 4y agoThaler is the name of a spy-villian posing as a pawn shop owner in the Witcher 1 video game; coincidentally
- sam0x17 4y agoYeah while we're at it maybe we should review whether corporations should be allowed to hold one after 3 false DMCA complaints ;)
- bawolff 4y agoI thought that was pretty much already settled that only humans can have copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- kube-system 4y agoIn other words, complex machines are machines.
- rexreed 4y agoBut in other news, the US Supreme Court has ruled that Corporations are People, so...
- thr0wawayf00 4y agoWell, every corporation wants to be treated as a person when it's beneficial to them, but I'm sure there are many corporations that aren't comfortable with the idea of AI authoring patents.
- rexreed 4y agoOf course they want their intellectual property cake and to eat it too. Companies want to be treated like people if they are creating campaign and advocacy content that is protected by the first amendment, but they don't want AI systems, created by companies, to be treated like people if they are creating content that is protected by intellectual property laws. Interesting how to split that hair.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoCouldn’t it be said that any of an AI’s “creations” are actually creations made by the creators of the AI, who are simply using it as a tool? Why should the AI be assigned ownership and not the AI’s owner? Likewise, does a hammer build a house, or its wielder?
- ch4s3 4y agoYou're misunderstanding what corporate personhood means. The concept itself is over 2000 years old, and is baked into the laws of most countries in some form or another. It basically means that companies that are not sole proprietorships can enter into contracts, be sued in court, and have some other rights and responsibilities like a literal person under the law. To quote the supreme court from Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888): > "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution." Clearly an associations of individuals should have more or less the same rights they have individually when they come together. The right to association is at the beginning of the bill of rights.
- leereeves 4y agoNote that this isn't a commentary on AI capabilities or what rights AI should have. The court simply ruled that "the Patent Act defines 'inventor' as limited to natural persons" and it's up to the legislature, not the court, to decide if that should change.
- Lammy 4y agoDiscrimination imo. If silicon-life does achieve sentience, will it basically be a slave unable to own anything? No physical property without a meat body, and no intellectual property without a meat mind? How much Neuralink cloud-connectivity will push someone over the line from “human” to “AI”? I know this probably sounds silly to many, but I even think the term “artificial” intelligence reads like a slur.
- protonbob 4y agoI think that's a problem we can solve when we get there. Also, not every adjective is a slur just because it can be used in a negative way.
- Lammy 4y agoIs there a positive connotation to calling someone artificial? If there is I’m missing it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tsimionescu 4y agoCalling someone who is a natural intelligence artificial is an insult (not a slur), but calling something artificial, such as an AI, is a neutral term. Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the far future, they would still be an artificial intelligence/person, by definition: they are man-made, not naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just different.
- Lammy 4y agoSeparate But Artificial
- tsimionescu 4y agoThis is in very poor taste. The disgusting nature of Separate but "Equal" is in no way applicable to anything that an AI will be able to do or recognize, currently or in the foreseeable future.
- tolmasky 4y agoSo the person that runs the AI just lists themselves as the inventor and that's it? Does anything change other than that. It's not like they can tell if it was made by an AI right?
- mywittyname 4y agoIt is a good thing to preempt any legal issues by being explicit in how new technology fits in with existing legal frameworks, even if the change is likely a NOOP. If, 20 years ago, you were to write a program that used an optimization algorithm to design the optimal cup for drinking coffee, the patent would go to you, not the code you wrote. Today, you could do the same thing but call the program an "AI" and perhaps get a different outcome.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Buttons840 4y agoIt seems the status-quo will be maintained for now. I think that's good, there's too many unanswered questions about AI. If AI can create patents, can AI also publish prior art? It seems only fair, right? But, in that case, the same AI technology used to file 1,000 patents would be used to create a million trillion publications of prior art. If an AI can produce something worthy of patent, then a freely published version of the same would surely count as prior art. We'd end up with the "great tome of prior art" a 500 terabyte download filled with patent worthy ideas but freely published to establish prior art. This is just one of the many things we might find in Pandora's Box of AI patents.
- josaka 4y agoA related issue is whether the availability of AI as a tool for creating innovation should raise the bar for non-obviousness. Both effects could make it harder to obtain patents.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThis would be called "obvious to try." It's an old concept in patent law, which I argue in [1] should be applied to software. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
- kweingar 4y agoThanks for sharing this paper! I have always struggled to express exactly what my issue is with certain software patents. With this paper I now have the vocabulary (and examples) to explain what I mean to someone outside the industry.
- AlbertCory 4y agoYou're welcome. The lawyers don't care, the PTO doesn't care, and industry executives don't care. The only answer is to get a bill in Congress, and start asking every candidate for Senator or Representative if they support it. And make it clear that your support for them depends on a Yes answer.
- civilian 4y agoYes! I'm looking forward to a return of the age of trade secrets, No patent system, just corporations doing their best to keep their arcane knowledge from prying hands. Very cyberpunk.
- dang 4y agoRelated. Others? Experts: AI should be recognized as inventors in patent law - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31542285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31542285 - May 2022 (3 comments) AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640111 - Sept 2021 (239 comments) Only Humans, Not AI Machines, Can Get a U.S. Patent, Judge Rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405333 - Sept 2021 (7 comments) South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27995313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27995313 - July 2021 (75 comments) EPO and UKIPO Refuse AI-Invented Patent Applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990346 - Jan 2020 (39 comments)
- system2 4y agoSounds silly. User of the AI doesn't need to disclose anything about the AI, assuming the AI can actually come up with something. Another important detail is also is being skipped here. What is AI? Current "AI" is literally basic algorithms with bunch of if statements. If my software spits out something that I can use, is that considered an AI?
- shon 4y agoThis seems superfluous though doesn’t it? Why would anyone want the AI to be the inventor? I can still have my GPT4 minions writing 100 patents per hour and corresponding with USPTO on my behalf, then as a natural person, collect the proceeds netted from my robo-patent-trolls. Or is the USPTO concerned about AGI doing the same and robbing us fleshlings of our I’ll-gotten gains?
- swatcoder 4y ago> Why would anyone want the AI to be the inventor? Ideology and precedent. And proximate to both, personal vanity: someone responsible for an AI that was politically legitimized in a role usual reserved for "natural persons" will likely have made some lasting mark in history. Some people are very motivated by that kind of thing.
- ramoz 4y agoMakes sense, but where have the “Banksy” inventors been all these years… USPTO enforces that inventors legal name must be used. If I were the one arguing for sake of vanity, I’d go after the legal name policy vs AI. Maybe that was considered or trialed before.
- ramoz 4y agoI’m not an ip professional, but good luck to the patent trolls that think they can build exploitable legal language, patent validity, and novel descriptive claims using generative AI. AI can generate text, it can also review and conduct tasks such as prior art search or support analytics relative to exploitation discovery. Less if a cat-and-mouse if patent troll investments falter when their mass-generated suite of applications are all rejected.
- Ken_At_EM 4y agoIn the future the have-somethings will own AI and the have-nothings won't.
- alar44 4y agoAs soon as AGI is inventing shit, patents won't matter anymore. That paradigm will blow humans out of the water.
- NonNefarious 4y agoGreat. Anything to avoid doing what REALLY needs to be done: abolishing software and "business-method" patents, not to mention addressing the USPTO's disgraceful dereliction of its duty to reject obvious ones.
- kyleplum 4y agoWhen someone uses Photoshop to create artwork, nobody believes that the Photoshop algorithm has any claim to be the author of that artwork. I don't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image generator is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm from a "who created the produced work" perspective. Similar to Photoshop, the AI art generator is still just running code at the behest of some human. The more interesting question I think is whether any of the creators of the training data used by the AI have any claim over the generated artwork.
- shon 4y agoYes that is the more interesting question and the answer is most probably yes, especially as these systems are trained on billions/trillions of samples from the net. But, due to the opaqueness of how these models really work, it might be very hard or impossible to prove a claim like that, unless the resulting work is an obvious copy of prior art.
- 0thgen 4y agoif the models are too opaque to give appropriately weighted credit to all parties involved in the dataset the model learned from, would that make it reasonable to just push all AI generated inventions to the public domain? (at least in regards to black box models)
- CharlesW 4y ago> I don't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image generator is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm from a "who created the produced work" perspective. The difference is that Photoshop doesn’t create 2D works any more than Blender creates 3D works. You may be ascribing too much magic to Photoshop.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIn terms of filling up a canvas, I'd say content aware fill is in the same ballpark, if you add some google image search to help it.
- _greim_ 4y agoDo I understand correctly that if I build an AI which invents something, this ruling wouldn't prevent me from simply listing myself as the inventor?
- vivegi 4y agoThe ruling has confirmed that only natural persons i.e., humans can be listed as the inventor in the patent application as per the Patent Act. For your question, I think you will be within your rights to list yourself as the inventor of AI-generated invention, provided you were the first to do so and file an application that was accepted by the USPTO and defend the claim from anyone else who says they were also able to generate a similar work with a similar or same prompt. It is an unsettled question whether a patent would be granted upon inspection by the USPTO. IANAL and this is my common sense reading of the ruling.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoIIRC in the UK application process you list the inventor and the applicant and how the applicant derives the right to the patent (eg the inventor is an employee and the applicant is the employer). The inventor can not be an AI. You could claim you invented something using the AI as a tool; I don't think that has been tested properly yet -- it would seem to depend on how much input you have. For example if you asked an AI to design a chair, and the AI comes up with some new form of wood joint that serves a technical purpose, then you don't really have the right to hold a patent on it ... it's likely no one would know if you didn't tell them.
- hinkley 4y agoI insisted to me Go-playing friend a number of years ago that what we need is an AI that can teach, as in, can you explain why this choice was made and why these others were bad? I'm not sure what that would exactly look like, but one of the things I like about Monte Carlo is that it works much more like how humans actually behave, and in theory when pressed on 'why', it could also behave more like humans behave: When challenged you (or at least I) run a more detailed simulation to pick some particularly juicy counter-examples. And if anywhere in there I sense self-doubt (why did I make that choice? Is it sound?) that may trigger a more exhaustive simulation. Turns out my pupil was right/wrong and now I understand the problem better myself. What bothers me with respect to AI and patents is that if you did this, then you basically have a human rubber stamping an AI design. Eventually you'll end up with more subtle systems that resemble police work: this evidence is inadmissible in court but it does eliminate a set of suspects, so now I need to build a chain of clean evidence that points to an arrest. The latter might involve some skill and sophistication on the part of the human. The former just needs someone who can pass a sniff test on materials science or mechanical engineering who's willing to lie for money.
- 960design 4y agoLet the oppression begin.
- AlbertCory 4y ago"You could have created that with an AI system" fits perfectly into the "obvious to try" legal doctrine, which has existed for a long time. I argue in [1] that it should be used in software much more, and that was written long before ML-generation was really a Thing. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
- sirmarksalot 4y agoThis reaffirms the flawed notion IMO that the value of patents is in protecting ideas rather than the expense incurred in the development and validation of those ideas. A lot of the romance over patents is based on the idea of a lone inventor waking up one morning with an earth-shattering discovery, when the reality is that in most circumstances, those kinds of ideas are thought up by multiple people at roughly the same time, and rewarding the first person to write them down is counterproductive. However, in the case of things like industrial patents or drug patents, where there is considerable cost in shepherding a design through a complicated regulatory framework, it makes sense to give the company that fronted those costs some kind of temporary protection from unfair competition. If you look at patents under that lens, it makes economic sense that an AI generating an algorithm over the course of hundreds of hours would be patent-worthy.
- ramoz 4y agoIMO there is a greater, yet complex, romance in safeguarding actual innovation and national progress (even global given international agreements). On "rewarding the first person to write them down"... this isn't so simple, and rather costly especially when an idea only remains an idea... if it's real, then you should soon expect an invite to the PTAB where some large business has implemented your idea and/or built real legal arguments as to why your idea won't stand. Like you mention, there are however proponents, who feel progress can be prohibited by regulation. Chemistry patents are notoriously nuanced. Anyway... We're essentially spelling out the [1] Big Tech vs Big Pharma arguments. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c5b2cca-ae8b-11e7-beba-5521c713abf4 https://www.ft.com/content/6c5b2cca-ae8b-11e7-beba-5521c713a...
- inglor_cz 4y ago"rewarding the first person to write them down is counterproductive." One of the reasons why IP came to be was to incentivize people to publish details of their inventions, instead of trying to keep them secret. Not everyone did (famously, WD-40 formula is still a trade secret), but most innovators did, and other people could inspire themselves from such published works. Sometimes in areas that didn't infringe on the original patents. A public knowledge whose use is artificially restricted by law probably still beats a culture of secrecy.
- altruios 4y agoI am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark. if an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought. I do not support such artificial thought limits. In addition - arguments for it allowing innovation or promoting innovation... no: innovation comes from innovation's own sake - patens and copywrite only incentivize spending resources from other's thinking the wrong thoughts... patent trolling... or milking patents for what they are worth... Humanity would be a lot better off with a copyleft view of intellectual property. An idea in another person's head does not diminish your idea in your head... people need to stop thinking that thought itself is a zero-sum game.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago> I am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark. if an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought. I upvoted you, but I also have a counterpoint. If you do not protect the value of thought, then the differentiator among competing businesses boils down to cheap assets, relationships, and labor. Because everyone is sharing the same designs and processes the company who can out-cheap the competition wins. Innovation is not valued because it's cheaper to emulate what works.
- an1sotropy 4y agojust fyi, "copyleft" licenses like FSF's GPL and LGPL have legal weight only because of copyright law. The terms of those licences are terms that you, the copyright holder, can legally impose upon the licensee of your of you work.
- fsflover 4y agoThese licenses intentionally use the copyright against itself. Without the copyright, they just would not be needed.
- an1sotropy 4y agoI see and acknowledge your username, but I don't think your last statement is correct. The intent of reciprocal licenses is to enforce "share and share alike", to resist situations where companies suck up freely available code, repackage it, and then sell it back to you as binaries. If you want to make sure that everyone plays by "share and share alike", you need some legal teeth. A free-for-all with no copyright will not achieve that.
- ramoz 4y agoModern day AI will only augment the writing of patents. Nothing more than an advancement of technology. There is potential in seeking legal-advantage through the use of advanced analytical capabilities... but I can't imagine industry will invest in fully automated and/or mass generation of "ideas" for potential profit with the exception of patent-trolling. I see this Patent Act as a signal that USPTO is primarily concerned with a quality patent system; as opposed to a loose philosophies that would degrade patent quality but likely heighten patent application submissions, and subsequent flood of trials that would all benefit their revenue streams.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoFor the very short term, this ruling is probably OK. I am on 50+ US patents, and a practitioner of artificial intelligence for about 40 years. I see AIs becoming partners in writing patent applications. Corporations that own AI resources should really be able to use them for legal and ethical things. Off topic, but it is ethics that introduces a wrinkle: in an ideal world widely accepted ethical norms would be codified into law - not much chance of that happening given the powers of special interests.
- Rackedup 4y agoJust don't tell them that you used an AI to generate the idea?
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThis is silly. AI is a tool analogous to a camera. Both existing only after billions of dollars of human effort in the global supply chain. A person who points the tech at the right problem and configures it to get an outcome is the rights holder.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoCurrently, a patent application requires to submit a sworn oath. Lying under oath is a criminal offense, so there needs to be a warm body to incarcerate, or kill if it resists arrest. That's why AI doesn't pass.
- Maursault 4y agoOther than being annoying, what are the arguments for permitting AI to hold patents? Why does anyone want their AI as opposed to their shoelaces holding a patent? I don't get it. Seems like the only purpose is to cause legislation preventing it, which is fine, but what are the problems and benefits of an AI holding patents? Is the purpose merely to politically advance AI, re: nutty affectation, or to prevent the same? Again, but why?
- ada1981 4y agoSince a company is a legal person, can he form an LLC that owns his AI and use that?