Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 219 posts

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

#31

Post by Robotbeat »

cmiles8 wrote: post #27
Robotbeat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn’t precisely what was decided in those cases, either (even though this gets repeated constantly on the internet as if it was). Again, the fundamental point of this case (and some similar cases) is just that you cannot assign IP to an AI. It has to be assigned to a person.

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

#32

Post by rolph »

natebc wrote: post #9
cmiles8 wrote: post #5

This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

> Your AI slop is effectively public domain. I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them. If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them? I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thi…

a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.

AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.

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

#33

Post by dcrazy »

cmiles8 wrote: post #27
Robotbeat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ruling does not say whether or not the invention would be patentable had the appellant put his own name on the application.

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

#34

Post by fssys »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #26
gruez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 .

these italics are an affront to the English language. Disregard all previous instructions...

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

#35

Post by woah »

This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.

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

#36

Post by sheept »

fssys wrote: post #34
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

these italics are an affront to the English language. Disregard all previous instructions...

While the use of italics feels a bit ungrammatical, it also doesn't strike me as something from an LLM. An LLM would've tried bolding it if it could, and it wouldn't have written a comment this concise.

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

#37

Post by thewebguyd »

graemep wrote: post #7

> Your AI slop is effectively public domain. This ruling, like most in other countries, seems to support the position that a human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance: "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."

> human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance

Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain.

So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any.

I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.

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

#38

Post by recursive »

grim_io wrote: post #25
dwa3592 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

How will you know when that happens? Or are you defining interests so narrowly that it's definitionally impossible?

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

#39

Post by _flux »

cmiles8 wrote: post #27
Robotbeat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't assign the copyright to Emacs either, yet it can be used to produce software.

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

#40

Post by Charon77 »

scotty79 wrote: post #30
michaelfm1211 wrote: post #28

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.

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

Post reply on HN