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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

#161

Post by biophysboy »

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…

Do you remember some of the studies this book cites? I always thought the drug development lag times and success rate made patents necessary. Do the authors make exceptions for rare disease or CNS therapies?

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

#162

Post by kube-system »

nashashmi wrote: post #155
kube-system wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. This sentence contradicts itself. The reason we attribute inventors is because we recognize it as a legal right. Patents exist to give humans, whether working individually or in a group, an exclusive right to that invention for a period of time, as a legal protection for the activity of inventing. My math…

> an exclusive right to that invention for a period of time, as a legal protection for the activity of inventing. Can you cite this? What I know is that only Twitter back in the day created this framework that would give inventors the right to disallow for their patents to be used for patent infringement lawsuits. Otherwise, not even the inventor(s) have the right to infringe on their own patents. Inventors have no r…

Rights of IP work done for hire is assigned to the payor. This is what I was referring to with the "in a group" call out in my above comment.

That's not simply a patent thing -- the copyright of the code you may write as a software engineer at work is assigned to your employer even though you may be listed as the author.

You can't take the software you wrote as an employee MegaCorp INC and sell it yourself next week, you would be infringing on their copyright (even though you wrote it).

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

#163

Post by Ajedi32 »

ClarityJones wrote: post #153
Ajedi32 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd quibble with that. Capitalism is a choice, market dynamics are not. E.g. The Soviet Union successfully outlawed capitalism, and in response market dynamics made their country collapse.

I don't think there's much meaning in saying the Soviets outlawed capitalism. Capital continued to exist and there continued to be people who decided what got built and who received them. To me, that's private ownership. I mean, it's not like apple trees suddenly began bearing Ladas. If I wanted to acquire a field to occupy / farm, it was presumably controlled by someone, either an individual person or group of peopl…

> there continued to be people who decided what got built

The distinguishing feature of capitalism is that the people who decide what gets built are private individuals in competition with each other, and incentivised by profit to meet the demands of consumers.

In communism the people who decide what gets built are part of a single central authority with no competitors and no profit motive. That system doesn't work, which is why it collapsed.

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

#164

Post by shh_labs »

kmoser wrote: post #135
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…

There are three issues in play here.

One is the philosophical one, which you've addressed.

The second is the legal one. The laws of most jurisdictions are written so as to presuppose that a human is the inventor, because legislators imagined nothing else when the laws were written. Internationally, most of the decisions finding that AI can't be named as an inventor are based on assumptions built into the wording of the law, not on philosophy.

The third is the economic one. In due course legislators need to consider whether it's economically advantageous for society for AI to be capable of being named as an inventor or not. That's not happened yet.

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

#165

Post by shh_labs »

saghm wrote: post #51
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.

Being a legal person is not a logical prerequisite for being named as an inventor on that argument alone, because there's not a legal liability that stems from being named as an inventor.

(That's not to say AI should or should not be capable of being named as an inventor).

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

#166

Post by arcticfox »

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,…

I think the "prove a negative" idea is a bit silly, my common sense says that the patent system should work better so if it doesn't, somebody's going to have to extensively prove it to me or show me a clear mechanism as to why it doesn't.

I could read a book on it but Italy/Switzerland (combined ~5-10% of drug discovery) making changes 60 years ago doesn't get me too excited about updating my priors.

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

#167

Post by keeda »

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…

This book gets a lot of airtime in discussions of IP but the authors have a narrative they are trying to push and they don't let inconvenient things like facts or history get in the way.

The book cherry-picks its sources, and even then contains several mischaracterizations and exaggerations of those works. There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.

As an example, see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46556404_Watt_Again...

Yep, the very first chapter of the book starts with patents and steam power, and they got called out on it by actual experts on the topic. Note the “still” in the title – this is after the book was already “revised” once. The book was not revised after this last note, so the exaggerations still stand.

The rest of the book had many similar issues. Once I started digging into their sources, I could not get past the first few chapters, but anecdotally others on HN have also pointed out glaring inaccuracies. I remember thinking wryly that it should be called “Against Intellectual Honesty.”

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

#168

Post by dmoy »

ano-ther wrote: post #146
alexpotato wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I was an intern at Merck MANY years ago and they had this interesting comparison. Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true: 1. Production has started 2. A patent has been filed The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue. If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all o…

2 I recognize, 1 not so much. Patents are usually filed as early as possible, because you risk losing priority to someone else. And you cannot file a claim on inventions that are in the public domain. But then it takes a decade or so to develop towards approval. You work together with outside researchers who lend their credibility and get attractive publication possibilities in return. Those publications also help to…

> because you risk losing priority to someone else.

Historically not so much in the US, but yes now that the US has joined the rest of the world with a first-to-file system

Assuming "MANY years ago" is >15, then the US was still in a first-to-invent system

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

#169

Post by saghm »

shh_labs wrote: post #165
saghm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being a legal person is not a logical prerequisite for being named as an inventor on that argument alone, because there's not a legal liability that stems from being named as an inventor. (That's not to say AI should or should not be capable of being named as an inventor).

I'm aware. Being named as an inventor is a benefit we sometimes give to people, and the point the other comment was making (as I understood it) is that AI shouldn't be able to only take the good parts of being a person and skip over the potential downsides.

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

#170

Post by dcrazy »

otterley wrote: post #145
dcrazy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ruling does not say whether or not the invention would be patentable had the appellant put his own name on the application.

If a person lists himself as the author but an LLM produces the work, they’re defrauding the government, which is a crime.

Er, no.
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