US technologist defeated in dispute with Intellectual Property Office over program-generated ideas.
The UK supreme court has ruled that AI cannot be designated as an inventor for patent rights, asserting that, under existing law, an inventor must be a person. The judgment was delivered on Wednesday.
The decision follows Dr. Stephen Thaler’s extended legal battle with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) over his attempt to designate an AI, DABUS, as the inventor for two patents. Thaler, a US technologist, argued that DABUS independently invented a food or drink container and a light beacon. Despite his claims, the IPO rejected his attempt in December 2019, stating that DABUS couldn’t be officially registered as the inventor in patent applications due to its non-person status.
The high court and court of appeal upheld the decision in July 2020 and 2021. Following a March hearing, a panel of five supreme court justices unanimously rejected Thaler’s case. The dispute concerning DABUS focused on the process of patent applications under the Patents Act 1977, not on whether the AI genuinely created the inventions. Lord Kitchin, supported by Lords Hodge, Hamblen, Leggatt, and Richards, affirmed the IPO’s correctness in determining that DABUS was not an inventor of the described products or processes in the patent applications.
He continued, stating, “It lacks personhood, not being a person or natural person, and it did not conceive any relevant invention. Consequently, it never qualified as an inventor under the 1977 act.”
The judge affirmed the IPO’s right to consider Thaler’s applications as “withdrawn” according to patent regulations, as he did not identify any individual he believed to be the inventor of the described inventions.
The supreme court also dismissed Thaler’s assertion that he had the right to seek patents for DABUS inventions based on his ownership of the AI.
Government guidance dictates that patents, affording legal protection, are awarded for innovations deemed new, inventive, and feasible in production or application. Thaler’s case reached the supreme court amidst heightened scrutiny of AI advancements, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, concerning their potential effects on education, misinformation dissemination, and the job market. During the March hearing, his legal team contended that patent law doesn’t expressly “exclude” non-human inventors and lacks stipulations regarding the “nature of the inventor.”
