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

131–140 of 219 posts

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

#131

Post by svara »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #125
svara wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

> Why would anyone invest in drug studies? To make a shit ton of money. These things are insanely profitable. Generics exist and they're still profitable. You can get 99% of drugs from over seas and they're still profitable. These companies make trillions of dollars over the years. Yes, they might make slightly less money, but they still would be making a shit ton of money.

Generics exist for drugs that usually someone did hold a patent for that has since expired and they're much less profitable than patented drugs.

Not sure how that address the point. Again, the investment to get a drug to market is gigantic and you're saying that someone should pay for that and someone else should get the reward. It really doesn't work that way. Everyone would want to be the one who didn't pay.

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

#132

Post by fsckboy »

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…

>my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes

at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.

the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.

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

#133

Post by svara »

shimman wrote: post #103
svara wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

[flagged]

It's not black and white- in pharma there are notable sources for investment that are not private, e.g. for orphan diseases that would otherwise not see enough investment due to lack of profitability.

But here's a mechanism to mobilize private capital for those diseases that are. Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.

You're asking someone to pay that money and allowing others to reap the rewards. Why wouldn't everyone want to be the one who didn't pay the money?

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

#135

Post by kmoser »

aeagentic wrote: post #112

I see it like a calculator, would u list a calculator as an inventor?

As much as your question may seem like reductio ad absurdum, it highlights the question of whether an automaton is capable of inventing and what it means to invent, just like the question of whether AI is actually "intelligent" and what AGI even means.

My opinion is that living beings like humans can invent; anything else (from simple calculator to sophisticated AI) is merely a tool that living beings can employ in their quest to invent.

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

#137

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

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 could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.

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

#138

Post by svara »

alzamos wrote: post #128
svara wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

The book goes into quite a bit of depth if it is a topic that interests you. I would flag that we’re getting into “prove a negative” territory here: the goalpost is that we need to prove empirically that patents achieve the desired outcome. If the scenario you describe accounts for all game-theory/incentive/complex-adaptive-system universes, we should see this reflected in the data. When it comes to pharmaceuticals,…

Thanks for actually giving a great answer to this versus the other knee-jerk comments! I will definitely look into this more.

I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.

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

#139

Post by graemep »

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.

But a human can hold the copyright on the output of an AI - but the requirements for that are not clear in the US yet. They are clear in the UK but the government is thinking of changing the law.

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #137
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 could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN