South African intellectual property officials have become the world’s first to grant a patent to an AI inventor. Across the globe, several lawyers have tried to register patents in the name of AI inventors. However, each time, they’ve failed. Until now!😏 Today, the South African Patent Journal attributed a patent to an AI inventor: Dabus (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience).
About Dabus
Dabus created a food container that uses fractal (repetitive pattern-based) designs to create indentations on the container’s sides. This invention helps with the storage and transportation of containers. It also makes it easier for robotic arms to grip them.
Stephen Thaler, CEO of Imagination Engines, spent more than a decade developing Dabus. Yet, Thaler has no experience designing food containers. According to him, Dabus came up with the idea for redesigning food containers after being fed big data on various topics.
The campaign to register Dabus as an AI inventor
A lecturer at the University of Surrey, Ryan Abbott, had been campaigning patent offices across the world for years to recognise AI inventors. However, he hadn’t succeeded. The reason is that, in most jurisdictions, only humans can invent and file patents.
A patent refers to exclusive ownership rights that a government authority grants to an inventor for a set period. It excludes others from making, using, or selling the invention.
According to Abbott, dismissing AI’s creative potential risks stifling investment into technology and innovation. Motivating this point, he explains that humanity is creating less and less. And, we are building AI that can invent products.
Abbott adds that “AI can, for example, look through a billion possible drugs to find one that treats a target, and that’s patentable stuff. And sometimes, when AI does that, you just don’t have someone who qualifies as an inventor. If we say you can’t get patents on this, then that really says to companies that are investing in AI, like DeepMind or Siemens or Novartis, you can’t use AI in these areas.”
Alternatively, Thaler claims that naming the AI’s owner (a business) as an inventor—in patent applications—is pointless since the business would be taking a legal risk by placing their identity on the patent application. Further, he believes that the business would not have made a significant contribution to whatever the AI produced. So, it would go against the spirit of patent law, which rewards the actual inventor for the invention. The risk is that if a competitor firm wanted to sue over the patent for whatever reason, the business would find it difficult to prove that it actually created the patent.
What does this decision mean for other AI?
So, since AI can be a patent inventor, several other questions arise. For example,
- Can AI can hold rights and responsibilities like humans and businesses?
- Can AI enter contracts as a contracting party?
- Is AI a legal person?
For now, it’s unclear. However, this event does suggest that South Africa needs to regulate AI to create legal certainty.
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