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

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

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

#51

Post by saghm »

sim04ful wrote: post #43

One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).

I agree with the other top-level comment next to yours (at the time of writing): when we're willing to enforce consequences for them in the same way we would for people. If I violate laws, I can get put in jail, and then I (most likely) can't use any computers until I get out. To consider an AI a person, it needs to have legal liability in the same way a fleshy person does.

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

#52

Post by Mountain_Skies »

sim04ful wrote: post #43

One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).

Corporate personhood has already been disastrous enough. We don't need to compound it with AI personhood on top.

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

#53

Post by alzamos »

The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.

With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.

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

#54

Post by Robotbeat »

natebc wrote: post #48
Robotbeat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).

This is the bit in the copyright offices' report that i'm trying to square: >The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

In January 2025. It’s also not a court decision, effectively an executive branch directive.

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

#56

Post by ipaddr »

lp4v4n wrote: 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.

Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.

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

#57

Post by kube-system »

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?

Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

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

#58

Post by amelius »

allears wrote: post #49

If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.

What I want to see is patent officers using AI to label patent applications as "not novel" if the AI can invent it.

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

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

#59

Post by grim_io »

recursive wrote: post #38
grim_io wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you are arguing that there is consciousness that's emerging from LLM's, I have to disagree on that.

We will know when we see it. I don't see it right now.

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

#60

Post by ep103 »

alzamos wrote: post #53

The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which…

I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

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