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.

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.

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.

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.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed on August 5 that only a natural person--not an artificial intelligence system--can be an inventor. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is widely applied as a tool in different technical areas, such as machine learning, image processing, and speech recognition. More complex AI technology can create new products or processes with little or no human help. If an AI system can independently create something new, can it be designated as an inventor? The Federal Circuit finally settled this issue--affirming decisions of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Eastern District of Virginia that an AI system cannot be an inventor.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of life and the UK government has recognized that it is important to review IP laws to ensure that they evolve and promote innovation in this fast-paced area of technology. That was the motivation behind a recent UKIPO consultation which reported earlier this week. With regards to patent protection for AI-devised inventions, the report concluded that no changes are required to UK patent law, at least for the time being. At present, despite claims of certain parties and the international court case relating to the DABUS system which its promotors sought to name as the inventor on patent applications in a number of countries, there is no evidence of AI currently having the capacity to invent. Rather, the general consensus from respondents was that AI technology cannot, at least at present, invent without human assistance.

It was the veritable search for a needle in a haystack. With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, researchers at MIT were sifting through a database of more than 100 million molecules to identify a few that might have antibacterial properties. Fortunately, the search proved successful. But it wasn't a human who found the promising molecules. It was a machine learning program.

It was the veritable search for a needle in a haystack. With drug-resistant bacteria on the rise, researchers at MIT were sifting through a database of more than 100 million molecules to identify a few that might have antibacterial properties. Fortunately, the search proved successful. But it wasn't a human who found the promising molecules. It was a machine learning program.

The day is coming--some say has already arrived--when artificial intelligence starts to invent things that its human creators could not. But our laws are lagging behind this technology, UNSW experts say. It's not surprising these days to see new inventions that either incorporate or have benefitted from artificial intelligence (AI) in some way, but what about inventions dreamt up by AI--do we award a patent to a machine? This is the quandary facing lawmakers around the world with a live test case in the works that its supporters say is the first true example of an AI system named as the sole inventor. In commentary published in the journal Nature, two leading academics from UNSW Sydney examine the implications of patents being awarded to an AI entity.

It was a machine learning program.