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AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

21–30 of 219 posts

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#22
> "... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created."

The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#23
post #17

In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications. And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.

[deleted]

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#24

I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+). The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago , from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts ... echo'ing Picass…

>The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra.

No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection.

>only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#25
post #18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I understand it. AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor. Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.

>>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.

Exactly, like any AI tool ever.

Someone wrote some instructions. No agent harness ever simply decided to pursue its own interests.

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#26
post #24

I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+). The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago , from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts ... echo'ing Picass…

>The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection. >on…

This is true, but I feel like it accomplishes the same spirit/thing.

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.

No. The court is saying you cannot assign IP rights to an AI, as this guy was trying to do. They are not saying it cannot be protected (as /r/antiai folk are always claiming). That’s another thing.

If you can’t protect it as copyright (which the US and others have separately said) then how are you “protecting” it? It’s not IP.

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#29
post #2

I really can't understand the moral compass of people who would pirate other peoples' works under "fair use" to train AI, only to turn around and try to claim ownership of them when AI regurgitates it.

Because AI doesn't just regurgitate it. Make up a new word and ask ChatGPT use it in a sentence - you've now got a brand new sentence that was not in its training data. If it only regurgitated data then it wouldn't be able to use that word in a sentence.

The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.

Re: AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

#30

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?

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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