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

91–100 of 219 posts

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

#91

Post by layer8 »

munk-a wrote: post #83
layer8 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn’t arguing for AI inventions to be patentable, I was arguing against the argument presented above, which to me doesn’t make sense as an argument.

I’m very much for not allowing trivial patents, but that’s independent from whether the invention was made by AI or by a human. The nature of the inventor should be immaterial for assessing the (non-)triviality of an invention.

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

#93

Post by phyzome »

s0ss wrote: post #45
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).

Consciousness?

Eh. No one has been able to prove to my satisfaction that they're conscious, or even simply define what it is that they claim to possess. Pick something else.

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

#94

Post by Folcon »

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…

Patents are an incentive to encourage an inventor to lay out an invention or process in exchange for the state protecting that process, we did this because there have been in the past inventions that have been lost, that were valuable largely because the inventor died without documenting what they did (keep in mind the first patent was issued in 1331[0], this is old law)

The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective

-[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

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

#95

Post by svara »

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…

You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all the studies you ran? Why would anyone invest in drug studies?

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

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

#96

Post by nashashmi »

kube-system wrote: post #57
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…

Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. The owner (person or corp) gets protection. AI is attributed as contributor or inventor.

With that said, AI contribution should always be disclosed in every medium that it participated in, including patents.

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

#97

Post by kube-system »

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…

> All LLM output is automatically public domain.

That is not exactly true under US law. You're simplifying what the copyright office has said to the point where you're missing the key points of what they were trying to convey.

The copyright office has affirmed multiple times that whether or not you use an LLM is irrelevant. Copyright eligibility requires "sufficient human-authored expressive elements". It doesn't matter what tools you use -- an LLM, a troop of trained monkeys, etc.

Ultimately all that matters is whether or not the human creativity involved qualifies. Because copyright is ultimately a right that protects human creativity.

So yes, if you put "write me a book" into ChatGPT -- that clearly does not quality for copyright. "Write me a book" itself is not creative enough for copyright.

Now on the other hand, if you spend 1000 hours writing a book, and you run it through ChatGPT for suggestions and/or edits -- there is no reason why that LLM output would not qualify.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

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

#98

Post by kube-system »

graemep wrote: post #82
thewebguyd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

AI isn't a legal entity that can do anything, let alone hold a copyright. It is an inanimate box of numbers.

The only two things that can transact with any legal system in any way are humans and groups of humans.

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

#99

Post by krapp »

kube-system wrote: post #98
graemep wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI isn't a legal entity that can do anything, let alone hold a copyright. It is an inanimate box of numbers. The only two things that can transact with any legal system in any way are humans and groups of humans.

That should be obvious but unfortunately lots of people believe (or have a vested interest in pretending to believe) LLMs are living, thinking, sentient entities and that belief is going to influence the politics and legislation around AI to some unknown degree.

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

#100

Post by kube-system »

ReptileMan wrote: post #13
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 something you own, because you wrote the prompt.

If sufficiently creative enough to qualify. Which applies to copyright regardless of the tools you use.
Post reply on HN