In Thaler v The Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (DABUS), Smith J. held that an AI owner can possibly claim patent ownership over an AI-generated invention based on their ownership and control of the AI system. This AI-owner approach reveals a new option to allocate property rights over AI-generated output. While this judgment was primarily about inventorship and ownership of AI-generated invention in patent law, it has important implications for copyright law. After analysing the weaknesses of applying existing judicial approaches to copyright ownership of AI-generated works, this paper examines whether the AI-owner approach is a better option for determining copyright ownership of AI-generated works. The paper argues that while contracts can be used to work around the AI-owner approach in scenarios where users want to commercially exploit the outputs, this approach still provides more certainty and less transaction costs for relevant parties than other approaches proposed so far.

A Tokyo court on Thursday ruled against granting patents to inventions generated by artificial intelligence in a dispute over whether AI -- not human beings -- can be recognized as an inventor. The ruling comes amid ongoing debates on how to regulate generative AI and is part of a transnational class action lawsuit launched by Ryan Abbott, a law and health science professor at the University of Surrey in England. The plaintiff filed for a patent in 2021 for a device generated by AI, listing the inventor's name as "DABUS, an artificial intelligence that autonomously invented this invention." Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) is an AI system developed by Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist and president of Imagination Engines, an AI technology company.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. An artificial intelligence system can't be registered as the inventor of a patent, Britain's Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a decision that denies machines the same status as humans. The U.K.'s highest court concluded that "an inventor must be a person" to apply for patents under the current law. The decision was the culmination of American technologist Stephen Thaler's long-running British legal battle to get his AI, dubbed DABUS, listed as the inventor of two patents.

AI may or may not take people's jobs in years to come, but in the meantime, there's one thing they cannot obtain: patents. Dr. Stephen Thaler has spent years trying to get patents for two inventions created by his AI "creativity machine" DABUS. Now, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court has rejected his appeal to approve these patents when listing DABUS as the inventor, Reuters reports. The court's rationale stems from a provision in UK patent law that states, "an inventor must be a natural person." The ruling stipulated that the appeal was unconcerned with whether this should change in the future. "The judgment establishes that UK patent law is currently wholly unsuitable for protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines," Thaler's lawyers said in a statement.

Artificial intelligence cannot be legally named as an inventor to secure patent rights, the UK supreme court has ruled. In a judgment on Wednesday, Britain's highest court concluded that "an inventor must be a person" in order to apply for patents under the current law. The ruling comes after the technologist Dr Stephen Thaler took his long-running dispute with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to the country's top court over its rejection of his attempt to list an AI he created as the inventor for two patents. The US-based developer claims the AI machine named DABUS autonomously created a food or drink container and a light beacon and that he is entitled to rights over its inventions. However, the IPO concluded in December 2019 that the expert was unable to officially register DABUS as the inventor in patent applications because it was not a person.

"A Recent Entrance to Paradise" is a pixelated pastoral scene of train tracks running under a moss-flecked bridge. It was, according to its creator's creator, drawn and named in 2012 by an artificial intelligence called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience). Thaler is appealing the decision. Thaler, a Missouri-based inventor and AI researcher, has become something of a serial litigant on behalf of DABUS. Judges have swatted away similar lawsuits in the European Union, the United States, and, eventually, on appeal, in Australia.

March 31, 2023 - Artificial Intelligence suddenly seems to be everywhere. ChatGPT is writing human-sounding sermons, news updates, and answers to law school exam questions, while Dall·E is generating images ranging from the lifelike to the surreal in response to virtually any prompt. With much less fanfare, AI has already become ubiquitous in myriad ways. AI curates social media feeds and generates purchasing suggestions to fill internet shopping carts. AI saves lives by identifying potential pharmaceutical compounds and by quickly and accurately interpreting medical scans and images.

LONDON (Reuters) – An American computer scientist on Thursday urged the United Kingdom's Supreme Court to rule he is entitled to patents over inventions created by his artificial intelligence system, in a landmark case about whether AI can own patent rights. Stephen Thaler wants to be granted two patents in the UK over inventions he says were devised by his "creativity machine" called DABUS. His attempt to register the patents was refused on the grounds that the inventor must be a human or a company, rather than a machine. Thaler's lawyer Robert Jehan told the Supreme Court in London that Thaler is "entitled to the rights of the DABUS inventions" because there is no requirement under UK patent law that an invention "must have a human inventor to be patentable". He argued in court filings that the owner of an AI system is "entitled to inventions generated by the system and to the grant of patents for those inventions if patentable". But lawyers representing the UK's Intellectual Property Office, which initially refused Thaler's applications in 2019, argued the appeal should be dismissed.

Dr. Stephen Thaler developed DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Science), an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can autonomously create patentable inventions. Thaler has filed patent applications in various jurisdictions for two inventions created by DABUS – a food container with side walls having a fractal profile, and a beacon for attracting enhanced attention for example in a search and rescue scenario[1]. In each application, Thaler listed DABUS as the sole inventor, forcing patent offices in various jurisdictions to address the issue of whether an AI system can be an inventor on a patent application. Thus far, the DABUS patent applications have found very limited success in patent offices and courts around the world. In the latest decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held that the US Patent Act requires an inventor to be a natural person, and consequently, an AI system cannot be an inventor on a United States patent application.[2] The DABUS applications were initially rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Can a machine be an inventor? After the courts said no, a computer scientist is once more trying to have an artificial intelligence considered an inventor in the eyes of the law. In August, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision that AI cannot be listed as the inventor on a patent registration. The case before the court--Thaler v. Vidal--was either a gimmick that could be dismissed with a simple reading of U.S. patent law or one that strikes at the heart of a metaphysical question with crucial implications for the future of innovation. In Thaler v. Vidal, Stephen Thaler challenged the refusal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to issue a patent registration for an invention Thaler claims was created by an artificial intelligence device called Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, or DABUS.