Can the petitioner re-file with his own name as the inventor, or does this mean that all AI-generated inventions are unable to be patented?

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kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

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ThrustVectoring an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Even if you were to extend rights to non-human entities, there's still a practical matter in that the legal system does not know how to compel testimony from an LLM (or a monkey for that matter, for a past attempt at copyrighting a photograph taken by a non-human primate)

	▲	kube-system 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And the entire point of a patent is to allow an inventor to profit from their invention for a fixed period of time to encourage inventors to invent things. This makes no sense when applied to a box of numbers. Numbers cannot have money, numbers are not motivated to make money, numbers cannot do anything on their own. This isn't real-life sesame street where today's episode was brought to us by a walking and talking number 7.

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nashashmi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. The owner (person or corp) gets protection. AI is attributed as contributor or inventor.

With that said, AI contribution should always be disclosed in every medium that it participated in, including patents.

	▲	kube-system 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. This sentence contradicts itself. The reason we attribute inventors is because we recognize it as a legal right. Patents exist to give humans, whether working individually or in a group, an exclusive right to that invention for a period of time, as a legal protection for the activity of inventing. My math teacher made me say whether or not I used a calculator. But that's not a requirement for patents. You don't need to say what tools you used, even if you used a really big calculator. Also, calculators don't anthropomorphize into inventors when they get really big. Inventing is, by definition, only something humans can do. Even other living creatures cannot be inventors.

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TrackerFF an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like many things, these differ by jurisdictions.

I believe in many countries, the standard for a wide range of IP is that if something is largely produced by AI systems, it can not be patented / copyrighted / trademarked. It seems that "a significant" contribution must have been done by humans, that's the word you'll see again and again.

But I am not sure how one could prove that something is produced mostly by AI, or mostly by human. Right now anyone could use AI models to do most of the work, and just say or make up documentation that it is (major) human work.

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john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."

implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

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scotty79 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, please let it be the second option. Let AI be the thing that kills the "intellectual property" because humans will never manage to shake off that terribly wrong decision by themselves.

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Charon77 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI.

Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well

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ajkjk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also...

You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side.

You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are provably unable to demonstrate). But you certainly might be able to prove it to the satisfaction of the legal system.

If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.

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RHSeeger 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of.

I assume the idea is that the fault/blame lies with the human(s) that caused the AI to generate something that violates copyright. Going back to previous comments, the typewriter that generated a document didn't infringe copyright - the person using it did.

	▲	ajkjk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		that's fair, I was interpreting them differently.

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lelanthran 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well

Why not? Content that isn't under copyright can certainly infringe copyright.

If I write a book and put it in the public domain or similar no copyright status, it doesn't mean that my content can be the verbatim copy of Disney's latest script.

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kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who says you need to? You can't definitively prove that prior art does/doesn't exist, either. That's not an impediment to getting a patent. The patent will be examined and issued based on the evidence found. If invalidating evidence is found later, the patent can be invalidated.

In a legal context what is necessary is evidence, not a math/logic formal proof.

> Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well

Because AI cannot pay fines, go to jail, or be assigned the rights of a human. However, a human who uses AI can. If you use AI to infringe copyright, you have infringed the copyright, not the AI.