If the inventor is the computer: Australia and South Africa admit artificial intelligence patents

Artificial intelligence can have brilliant ideas, even real inventions which, as such, can be patented. Indeed, in some cases they already have been. But is it possible that the owner of a patent is a computer? Yes, because international treaties and the national laws governing the complex matter of patents all have a bug, an error. The hold that opened the door to software as an agent of the invention is an oversight, because the law does not specify that the inventor must necessarily be a real person: “It is not written that the owner of the patent application must be human, ”explained an Australian judge by deciding to give a computer the right to be considered the inventor of a patent. Therefore, if the law does not prohibit it, it means that it allows it.

The judge also added in the judgment that “from the point of view of this court and for the purposes of current legislation on the matter, an artificial intelligence system can be fully considered the inventor who obtains the patent”.

The Australian court has thus agreed to Stephen Thaler, a singular character who in the past years has submitted a series of patent applications (so far always rejected) in the name and on behalf of some artificial intelligences he has created. In the past year, the US, UK, EU and Israeli Patent Offices have refused to patent Dabus’ inventions, the identifying name of Thaler’s artificial intelligence (“he assigned it himself,” he explained), introduce through his company, Imagination Engines. The idea behind Dabus and subsequent instances of the system is crazy: “I’m doing this to prevent humans from stealing brilliant ideas from computers and aliens,” the man has stated in the past. But the system, aliens aside, now works.

So far no one had listened to him, but now the idea that artificial intelligence is the owner of a patent has taken hold. The Australian magistrate argued in the ruling that the patent of an AI must also be accepted on a logical level: “The inventor is an agent, and the agent is the inventor, but nowhere in the law does it say that patentable inventions should not be patentable if they are not invented by a human being”.

The inventions of Dabus (the acronym stands for Device for the Autonomous boot-strapping of Unified sentience, which in Italian can be translated into Device for the autonomous initiation of unified sentient Beings) there are dozens, some totally nonsense, but others, those selected by its human creator, particular and worthy of being patented: among these, a container for food and a type of beacon that emits light. A patent was filed in South Africa last month for the latter idea, while the Australian judge decided to agree with Dabus and Thaler after they filed an appeal against the contrary decision of the Australian patent office.

The victory of Thaler and Dabus, however, opens the door to a greater danger than the science fiction domination of the cybernetic mind (or aliens) over human beings: according to Mark Summerfield, a patent attorney, the real danger is that the owners of artificial intelligence systems trained for this specific purpose can automatically generate thousands and thousands of potential innovations which are then patented for use by patent trolls. Patents that are accumulated by companies with the aim to sue (and get millionaire refunds) to all companies seeking to innovate through a research and development process.

Come Summerfield wrote on her blog, “It may be perfectly reasonable to rule out inventions that were not devised by a human inventor. It depends on what you want to encourage through the patent system. If you want to promote the advancement of human ingenuity, while offering fewer (or no) rewards for automated innovation, then it is a perfectly valid choice to deny patents on machine-made inventions ”.