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

71–80 of 219 posts

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

#71

Post by alzamos »

ep103 wrote: post #60
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…

There are two things to tackle here which I’m keen not to mix up as I think their epistemological properties are quite different:

1) [the stronger one] while the scenario/narrative is a compelling one (or maybe it just feels compelling as I’ve heard it so many times), if it doesn’t have experimental/data backing I have to abandon it.

2) [the weaker one, as it replaces a narrative with another narrative within a complex system] I’ll only give the highlights as the arguments are a lot more eloquently laid out in the book; part of it is comparing the force of “many inventor nodes building on top of many invention nodes” vs “inventor nodes (with more investment individually?) building on top of fewer invention nodes”, part of it is the game theory effect of companies collectively investing less (proportionally) in R&D as the ROI from lawyers under this regime has more power, part of it was that actually, the reverse-engineering-simplicity story was too overblown and that actually the friction + domain knowledge has a stronger effect than people think (they published a paper on this). There were others, but it’s been a while now!

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

#72

Post by hlynurd »

layer8 wrote: post #69
ep103 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long. But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to inven…

Yet an ungodly amount of money has been pouring into AI R&D

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

#73

Post by michaelchisari »

layer8 wrote: post #69
ep103 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long. But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to inven…

The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

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

#74

Post by Asooka »

ep103 wrote: post #60
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…

Reverse engineering may be easy for really simple inventions, but quickly becomes so hard you may as well invent the thing from scratch. Look at USSR's domestic chip production. At one point they succeeded in reverse-engineering chips like Intel's 8086, VAX etc., but chip design very quickly became so complex reverse-engineering the entire chip became impossible. I would say if an invention can be easily reverse-engineered, then it is a simple foundational idea that should not be patented, and if it is truly innovative, then it cannot be reverse-engineered easily and doesn't need patent protections.

Then there is the fact that when something is patented, that has a chilling effect on competition, making the market less efficient.

There are also a lot of really silly patents that end up benefitting no-one, not even their inventor, but only result in needless litigation. The recent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair comes to mind.

While there are cases in which patent law can help individual people profit from their invention, once all consequences are tallied, the overall effect of patent law on society appears to be negative.

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

#75

Post by recursive »

grim_io wrote: post #59
recursive wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. I'm not saying anything about consciousness.

Does a gradient descent algorithm pursue its interest of minimizing error? Does a home automation assistant pursue its interests when it sets my thermostat? I'm not super interested in the definition of "consciousness" or "interests". However, a thermostat setpoint has effects that are visible in the real world. That's a thing that happened, regardless whether you consider it to have happened in "the pursuit of an interest".

I'm saying that LLMs are affecting the world. And sometimes those effects might be difficult or impossible to trace back to a particular prompt written by a particular human. Chatbot input and output doesn't have to be in the form of text i/o. You can put them in a for loop. Remember OpenClaw?

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

There might exist an incentive to make it hard to see.

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

#76

Post by jordanpg »

The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.

To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].

The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.

That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.

[1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/

[2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

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

#77

Post by ivan_gammel »

ep103 wrote: post #60
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…

In many research-intensive products go-to-market costs are bigger than the cost of actual invention. You buy a pharma startup for a few million for their patents, then spend tens of millions on certification, trials and manufacturing pipelines. Your competitors would spend most of that too on the same markets. Also, true inventions are rare. A lot of stuff that is being patented is just effort spent, that a lot of people could reproduce (and routinely reproduce, then hit the patent and spend more time to find a workaround).

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

#78

Post by Frost1x »

pfdietz wrote: post #63

If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.

AI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term.

While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.

I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.

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

#80

Post by layer8 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #73
layer8 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long. But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to inven…

The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.

Not all inventions can be effectively kept secret, and patents also have the benefit that what would otherwise remain secrets gets published.

I’m not in favor of the current patent landscape, but doing away completely with them would likely be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Post reply on HN