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ARTICLE · 13 JULY 2022

AI Inventions And Patent Law

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A worldwide agreement on protection of inventions made by Artificial Intelligence is essential to address the threats posed by AI to the patent system, argue two academics at the...

United KingdomIntellectual Property
David Hufton
David Hufton
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A worldwide agreement on protection of inventions made by Artificial Intelligence is essential to address the threats posed by AI to the patent system, argue two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia in a recent article1 published in Nature.

AI-Generated Inventions

In the article, Alexandra George and Toby Walsh argue that the attempts by Dr Thaler to obtain patents naming his DABUS system as inventor show that current patent law struggles to deal with an inventor that is a machine and that failure to recognize AI-made inventions as patentable will disincentivize useful research using AI inventors.

While it is hard to disagree with the observation that machine inventors were not a consideration for the drafters of the treaties underlying international patent law, it is less clear that applying current IP law to inventions using AI is a "struggle".

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