This seems like a trivial administrative hurtle. My AI didn't invent that, I did....
I recall a seminar in grad school where they had a legal scholar come in and I remember her saying that the general prescient for ai is that it's viewed as a tool for creating the end product. I.e. my pen didn't make the patent for Jim's Amazing Patent (tm), but I did and I used the pen to design and sketch it out.
US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My first thought is that this perspective is conflating Capitalism with a Free Market. Free Markets are about competition and consumer rights. Capitalism - from what I've read - is about a minority having the decision making power with regards to capital allocation. So the USA has a free market system ran by capitalists. I would argue that IP laws can be favorable from the perspective of Capitalism but not the Free M…
Capitalism, as defined by communists is about the "private ownership of the means of production". The term has now been widely adopted, even by its defenders, although we don't care specifically about the means of production, we defend property whenever it enhances the freedom of the human individual (an abstract individual, not any specific person).
Intellectual "property" doesn't enhance freedom in any way. Most libertarians and philosophical defenders of capitalism agree with me on this (except Ayn Rand fans)
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#33This 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…
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 poss…
This seems to rely on a fine parsing of 'invent', which is probably as fruitless as the fine parsing of whether AI 'thinks'.
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My first thought is that this perspective is conflating Capitalism with a Free Market. Free Markets are about competition and consumer rights. Capitalism - from what I've read - is about a minority having the decision making power with regards to capital allocation. So the USA has a free market system ran by capitalists. I would argue that IP laws can be favorable from the perspective of Capitalism but not the Free M…
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#36This seems like a trivial administrative hurtle. My AI didn't invent that, I did....
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.
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#37This 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 indi…
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#38If 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).
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#39Patents 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.
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.
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.
Re: US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor
#40Patents 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.
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.