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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

#81

Post by michaelchisari »

layer8 wrote: post #80
michaelchisari wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.

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

#82

Post by graemep »

thewebguyd wrote: post #37
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 ti…

Yes, provided you can separate the two (e.g. a book and illustrations in one case). AFAIK the courts have still not ruled on what happens when AI and human contributions cannot be separated etc.

It varies a lot in other countries, but in most (if not all) an AI cannot hold a copyright.

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

#83

Post by munk-a »

layer8 wrote: post #64
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #21

Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.

This appears to be confusing patent inventors with patent owners. It’s the latter who benefit and presumably are accountable for the use of the patent and potential plagiarism.

If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.

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

#84

Post by pfdietz »

Frost1x wrote: post #78
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 strengt…

No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI.

Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)

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

#85

Post by post-it »

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…

> Patents incentivize investment in R&D.

In theory or in real life?

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

#86

Post by kube-system »

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.

This is just as hair-brained as going down to the police station and claiming that your gun just murdered someone, then being surprised when they don't put the gun in jail.

The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.

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

#87

Post by kube-system »

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.

How would you even recognize the assignment of property rights to a big box of numbers?

And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?

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

#88

Post by ajkjk »

RHSeeger wrote: post #61
ajkjk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the three claims you just made, two are clearly false and the third is probably also... You can prove something is created by AI by e.g. showing the transcripts, especially from the vendor side. You cannot prove that something isn't created with AI, at least not if you require incontrovertible proof (outside of, like, working in some kind of verifiably AI-free clean room, or doing something that current models are…

> If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, it does not follow at all that they can't infringe copyright; there is no deductive step there that I can think of. I assume the idea is that the fault/blame lies with the human(s) that caused the AI to generate something that violates copyright. Going back to previous comments, the typewriter that generated a document didn't infringe copyright - the person using it di…

that's fair, I was interpreting them differently.

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

#89

Post by pclmulqdq »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #77
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…

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 pe…

This sounds like it is working as intended. The patent comes early in the process to protect all the commercialization investment. Patents are intended to be filed early in the process, and they gain value as the invention proves its worth. Note also that you can patent a mining claim before pulling a single precious gem or mineral out of the ground.

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

#90

Post by sebastianconcpt »

pfdietz wrote: post #63

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

The problem is that you have creations that aren't really obvious. Have you seen that rocket engine with a crazy laborious design made with an AI?
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