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ARTICLE · 10 JANUARY 2022

EPO Rejects Patent Application Identifying AI System DABUS As Inventor

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The Legal Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) has affirmed the decision of the Receiving Section that a patent application cannot succeed where the designated inventor is not a person, but an AI machine.

United KingdomIntellectual Property
Seiko Hidaka
Seiko Hidaka
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The Legal Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) has affirmed the decision of the Receiving Section that a patent application cannot succeed where the designated inventor is not a person, but an AI machine.  An auxiliary request had also been made indicating that a natural person was to have "the right to the European Patent by virtue of being the owner and creator of" the artificial intelligence system DABUS. This did not meet the provisions of the European Patent Convention (EPC) either.

Background

The patent application is a test case that has been tried across the world, the updated overview of which can be gleaned in our previous report (see the 'What is happening around the world?' section of the article). The main issue before all of the tribunals was whether the patent system permits the naming of an AI system as inventor or not. It was assumed that the invention was devised entirely autonomously by the AI machine.

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