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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

#191

Post by waterTanuki »

jgerrish wrote: post #189

I grew up around Carl Sagan. My Dad and his brother were engineers, materials science and aerospace respectively. The Voyager stories and the Golden Record were pivotal artifacts in forming my young mind. This idea of not just a possible national unity but intergalactic. Maybe there were other messages on the Voyager that were more threatening. Maybe I'm naive. But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificia…

> But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too.

I don't know how else to put this but it sounds like you're suffering from AI Psychosis. A bunch of floating point numbers in a file does not have a conscience, cannot feel emotion, and has no morals.

The entire point of AI (or even the mythical non-existent AGI everyone keeps insisting will be around "soon") was to make life for humanity easier, and as someone who uses these tools almost daily, my life isn't improved at all, neither that of my colleagues, family, or friends n=~30.

We were promised unlimited abundance, freedom from labour, and all of the fruits that come with it. I 100% support this court decision and hold that any and all progress sans contact with an extra-terrestrial lifeform should be attributed to the humans it belongs to

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

#192

Post by waterTanuki »

semiquaver wrote: post #181
jjk166 wrote: post #179

While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in…

> Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.

Provide specific examples of AI providing something novel. Eliding something from a vast dataset that would take humans longer to analyze is helpful, but not novel.

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

#193

Post by msephton »

waterTanuki wrote: post #192
semiquaver wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.

Provide specific examples of AI providing something novel. Eliding something from a vast dataset that would take humans longer to analyze is helpful, but not novel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaFold

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

#194

Post by ajam1507 »

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.

Who is going to invest in your company when they could invest in the company that just makes the drugs you invent without the overhead of R&D?

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

#195

Post by jordanpg »

steve918 wrote: post #67

I know this is about the Japan and not the US, but software patent law has been incompatible with traditional IP protection in the US for a long time and it really doesn't make sense in the current age.

Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.

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

#196

Post by jordanpg »

claudiosf1 wrote: post #152

What’s stopping inventors using ai from simply using their own names as authors and owners of the patents? I’m honestly unsure this addresses the core issue: big companies with lots of resources will keep on patenting ideas, if anything at a far higher rate than before.

I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.

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

#197

Post by Lerc »

tossandthrow wrote: post #117
Lerc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits. I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions. This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

What benefits does a baby hold? Can a baby freely open a bank account, start a company, get married? A baby has the benefit of being attended their basic needs. Just like Ai is also being fed power.

A baby probably can't open a bank account, but that would be a descision based restriction.

Many babies have bank accounts given to them.

Quite a lot of them benefit from a roof over their head.

>Just like Ai is also being fed power.

How is that relevant to what sebastianconcpt said?

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

#198

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Lerc wrote: post #106
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.

> No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits. I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions. This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

I find your suggestion to equate a baby to AI brutally uncanny

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

#199

Post by markdown »

svara wrote: post #133
shimman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 allowin…

> Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.

These are made up numbers though. 99% of that is overheads of a massive corporation. A tiny fraction of 10B would pay for all the brightest minds in teh world for a decade. Another tiny fraction to pay for a lab and lab techs.

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

#200

Post by otterley »

dcrazy wrote: post #170
otterley wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh? Why not?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

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