
US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor - daniel_assan
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241251/artificial-intelligence-inventor-united-states-patent-trademark-office-intellectual-property
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drdeadringer
This reminds me of an early scene in the film adaptation of Asimov's
"Bicentennial Man" when robots had no individual rights at all.

The robot in question presents anomalous behavior such as creativity and
curiosity. US Robotics offers a free replacement for this defective unit but
the owner refuses much to the chagrin of US Robotics; the owner and family
want this defective, creative, curious robot.

Along the way of making and selling high-quality clocks, the robot incurs some
minor damage which requires repair at US Robotics.

The owner, his robot, and his lawyer get face time with the US Robotics CEO
and corporate lawyer. "We've installed warning sensors around key points of
this robot's positronic brain. Whilst repairing his damaged finger, if we
detect any incursion into his positronic brain, we shall sue you and this
company for the loss of all of his potential revenue that he could have made
from now until the end of time."

A few hard swallows later and the robot walks out with a restored finger and
an undamaged, anomalous positronic brain.

~~~
seemslegit
In not-unplausible future reality: the anomalous robot dies about 2 and a half
years old because of planned obsolescence, warranty is product-lifetime.

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kube-system
Maybe I'm being a bit cynical, but this suggestion smells like an attempt at a
patent-grab by someone who owns some AI tech.

"You used my AI in the process of inventing something? Well, I guess your
patent belongs to me now."

~~~
softwarejosh
ai is ridiculously easier to clean room reverse if you have the dataset. but
yeah, if you use some tensorflow knockoff to create art that art might not
belong to you

~~~
kube-system
That's a ridiculous idea. AI is a machine like anything else. If I use any
other machine to produce a creative work, I own the rights to it. There is no
reason for tensorflow to be treated differently.

(edit: artwork is probably not a great 1-1 example here because it is not
patentable.)

~~~
falcor84
I fully disagree, on two grounds.

1\. AI is by far our least machine-like invention yet. Our ability to predict
the choices a state of the art AI makes, or even reason about them, is
extremely limited. As a relevant example, I would argue that AlphaGo's move 37
was creativity by the AI and not its creators, none of whom was a Go
grandmaster.

2\. AIs can iterate and output creative works extremely rapidly. If we credit
all such creative works to the AI's creator with the current IP approach, it
would allow them to amass a potential treasure trove of IP that would put
everything that came before to shame. And if they then use this for
litigation, then the future could be very gloomy for a while.

~~~
kube-system
1\. This is again not unique to AI. Mankind has created a lot of inventions
which work via mechanisms that humans do not fully understand. A lack of human
understanding into an invention's detail of operation does not indicate that
the invention itself possesses creativity. e.g.: [0]

2\. Creativity is not a fixed resource that is allocated.

> If we credit all such creative works to the AI's creator with the current IP
> approach

This is not the current approach. This is what the Artificial Inventor Project
is lobbying the USPTO to do, and it is what I am criticizing.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action#Drugs_with...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action#Drugs_with_unknown_mechanisms_of_action)

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panzagl
My guess is the Patent Office doesn't want to be swamped by some machine
learning equivalent of adding 'on a computer' to every verb in the dictionary.

~~~
jldugger
More like they don't want to be flooded by fully automated patent filings
without a fully automated patent reviewer.

~~~
r00fus
Sounds like the automated patent reviewer is the unix _yes n_ command for now.
Sounds pretty solid.

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pavlov
There's no viable technical or legal definition of "artificial intelligence."

If this were allowed to pass, Adobe would be able to make co-creator copyright
claims on your photos because Photoshop's masking tools contain AI features
(according to their definition anyway).

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fermienrico
Patents should be eradicated from this planet. China will outgrow US/EU/Japan
because they have little enforcement for these things and execution matters,
not ideas.

~~~
gnulinux
I simply don't understand how we managed to justify this patent and
intellectual property mess in the capitalist system. Capitalism is all about
competition and the right to choose the better product, whereas the current
system encourages monopoly. I don't understand.

~~~
jl6
The big Isms don’t exist in the real world - every country is a mixed economy
to a greater or lesser degree.

IP is a bargain between state and author. The state agrees to let the author
charge rent on their IP for a limited period of time, thus incentivizing the
creation of that IP. In return, the public gets to enjoy that IP’s existence -
and eventually enjoy it for free.

How long should the limit be? Here lies the debate. The longer the period, the
greater the incentive to invest in production of the IP. For example, a movie
studio spends $300m+ on a movie because they expect to gain that back via an
income stream that lasts for many decades. If their period of protection was
only, say, 5 years, their return on investment would be less and thus the
investment amount would be less.

So one way to think about the copyright protection length is to ask: do we
want to live in a world where investing $300m+ in a movie is a rational thing
to do, or would we be content with movies costing no more than $30m, or $3m?

Sure, celebrities are paid too much, but for some variation of this argument
you may agree that reduced copyright terms limit the type of movies that can
be made.

You can substitute movies for pharmaceuticals if you like - longer patent
terms mean a bigger payoff for investing in new medical research. Tweak patent
length and you change what drugs exist.

I personally disagree with the patentability of some things (like software),
and with the length of copyright, but I also like that movies like, say, Lord
of the Rings exist, so it’s not a trivial issue for me. I want a healthy
public domain but I also would be sad if the Bakshi LOTR version was all we
ever had.

~~~
greiskul
But copyright is not 5 years right now, it's 70 years after the death of the
creator. You say the longer the period, the greater the incentive to invest,
but there are definitely diminishing returns there. Does anyone actually
believe we would have greater investment if it was 80 years? Or 90 years?
Maybe it should be 300 years, for all those companies looking for investments
that take centuries to be realized. And look at all amazing work that has been
produced based on public domain works, the Disney movie empire was basically
created on it. I think we can pretty much say that yes, reduced copyright
terms would increase the types of movies that we see.

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rayuela
This seems like a trivial administrative hurtle. My AI didn't invent that, I
did....

~~~
snarf21
This AI did invent anything in a vacuum. There is some analogy to a fitness
function that drove it to a result. It is _not_ self aware.

~~~
jobigoud
> It is not self aware

It's a bold move to encode that into law when we don't know if that woll hold
true in some decades.

~~~
pnw_hazor
luckily laws are mutable.

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MrsPeaches
If anyone wants to read about the history of patents, I found these wiki
articles pretty interesting.

Any history of patent nerds out there for a hot take on TFA?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Patent_Statute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Patent_Statute)

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Communitivity
This collides with other rulings, or seems too. For example, from
Wikipedia[1]:

"The laws of the United States hold that a legal entity (like a corporation or
non-profit organization) shall be treated under the law as a person except
when otherwise noted. This rule of construction is specified in 1 U.S.C. §1
(United States Code), which states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context
indicates otherwise—

the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies,
associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as
well as individuals;"

If a corporation can own patents and have legal personhood, then you might get
to the point where an AI is the corporation, and thereby could own patents. I
am thinking of the DAO (Distributed Autonomous Corporation). I am also
thinking of the Cat series of novels by Joan D. Vinge, which contain an AI run
corporation [3].

Another consideration is that we are seeing AIs invent things now in the
fields of medicine, material science, music and perhaps others. If AIs own
these inventions then whoever owns the AI owns the inventions.

Given the DAO, if an AI can own assets then I don't see any way an AI cannot
own a patent.

Yet another angle though is liability. If an asset owned by the AI is found to
be the cause of someone getting injured, then who is at fault? Who has to pay
damages?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_law_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_law_in_the_United_States)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_\(organization\))

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_D._Vinge#Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_D._Vinge#Cat)

~~~
simion314
>AIs invent things now

Do you mean AI find things? Current AIs are just a complex algorithm for
searching or approximating stuff. You might argue that some algorithms "learn"
but that is just an algorithm that is adjusting some weights based on some
algorithm someone created. AI is a tool, tools don't invent things. Maybe
future AI like the ones in SciFi could invent things but for now we don't know
that is even possible.

~~~
JadeNB
This seems to rely on a fine parsing of 'invent', which is probably as
fruitless as the fine parsing of whether AI 'thinks'.

~~~
simion314
Invent implies some creativity, an algorithm that follows exact steps to find
what was asked has no creativity.

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paulus_magnus2
Anything an existing AI "invented" is not an invention. It should go directly
to common knowledge. One could argue the AI that did the inventing could be
patented somehow.

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chermanowicz
OK, but can its owner hold the copyrights to its works? This is probably a
more pertinent question.

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flowersjeff
I don't know... is it wise to piss off Skynet? (I wouldn't) ;-)

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withinboredom
May Roko's Basilisk have mercy on them.

