[HN Gopher] AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court...
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AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules
Author : belter
Score : 350 points
Date : 2021-09-24 09:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| AI doesn't exist so they're kind of jumping the gun here.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| I agree with this. Until we reach AGI where it can think for
| itself, this shouldn't be done. If they were to prove it, someone
| could claim that the AI was responsible for any harm that occurs
| due to the use of IP.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| I thought this was settled in Shmullus v. Broht & Forrester.
| rozim wrote:
| I have wondered if robots can own assets for example if there's a
| robot that walks around picking up aluminum cans and then taking
| them to a recycling center and getting paid for them, can it
| deposit that money in a bank account and be said to be the owner
| of the assets.
| dbtc wrote:
| I think there's a difference between legal and practical
| ownership.
|
| Cryptocurrency is basically designed for this.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Robots are always owned by some human entity though, including
| their bank account. It could just be another legal "virtual
| person" like a corporation.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > can it deposit that money in a bank account and be said to be
| the owner of the assets.
|
| most definitely, yes. why wouldn't it be the owner?
| whbrown wrote:
| No need to speculate, how about crows trained to pick up
| cigarette butts?
|
| It's probably up to the bank, and of course rather challenging
| for them to pay their income taxes as we all must ...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There's a minimum threshold, and I don't think crows would
| earn enough to end up paying it. But if they did... surely
| there's some mechanism for dealing with individuals who have
| the capacity to provide significant value to society (=1 get
| paid a lot), but lack the capacity to do government
| paperwork.
|
| 1: for the sake of argument, assume this
| platz wrote:
| Can a crow become the mayor
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Usually, that position is restricted to humans. Maybe
| there's a crow sufficiently competent at mayoral duties,
| but crows aren't great at abstract verbal communication
| via sentences; I doubt any crow would be good at the job.
| (Though if no crow is competent, why have laws
| restricting them from being eligible?)
| spaceman10 wrote:
| This is a corporation with extra steps.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Obviously; AI is similar in complexity to the global supply chain
| and billions of R&D that outputs a digital camera.
|
| The person who pushes the shutter button is the 'inventor' of the
| picture.
| HMH wrote:
| This very much reminds me of "The Measure of a Man" [1], one of
| my favorite episodes of Star Trek: TNG. Just as in this actual
| case AI rights are discussed, albeit things are a little more
| dramatic than a ruling about patents. It has to be decided
| whether to Data, an android/machine, should be granted the same
| rights as to a person or if it is fine to dismantle him for
| research purposes without asking.
|
| While I agree with the current ruling in the UK, this statement
| does not sit too well with me:
|
| > "Only a person can have rights. A machine cannot," wrote Lady
| Justice Elisabeth Laing in her judgement.
|
| In my opinion this sets a bad precedent in case we ever achieve
| artificial general intelligence (AGI) [2], which I think is
| perfectly possible, especially considering that we humans are
| nothing but complicated biological machines. And I think an AGI
| should very much be considered a person. That's why I think the
| way how a US judge in a prior cases put it is more agreeable:
|
| > As technology evolves, there may come a time when artificial
| intelligence reaches a level of sophistication such that it might
| satisfy accepted meanings of inventorship.
|
| > But that time has not yet arrived, and, if it does, it will be
| up to Congress to decide how, if at all, it wants to expand the
| scope of patent law.
|
| But admittedly this is still all very hypothetical as I don't see
| AGI happening in the near future and for now there is no real
| problem.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_%28Star_T...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
| chime wrote:
| > > "Only a person can have rights. A machine cannot," wrote
| Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing in her judgement.
|
| The fight will then be to get AGI classified as a person. If a
| corporation can have personhood, it is not impossible for AGI
| to have the same.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Corporate personhood is a misunderstood issue. They aren't
| treated like a natural person. Corporations for example can't
| be inventors on a patent either.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I was wondering about this. What happens when someone
| invents a patent related to their work? It is strange to me
| if the IP belongs to the company but not the patent.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Depends what the person's employment contract says. 95%
| of the time, the inventor is required to assign all
| rights to inventions related to the companies' work to
| the company.
|
| So you have inventor: Steve Wozniak; assignee: Apple Inc.
|
| Assignment allows the owner to be different from the
| inventor.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > If a corporation can have personhood, it is not impossible
| for AGI to have the same.
|
| The basis for corporate personhood is that it is made up of
| humans. The benefits of a corporation flow to real humans.
| Real humans actually direct how a corporation will be run. In
| the event of crimes, the corporate veil can be pierced to go
| after the real humans behind it.
|
| The "personhood" of corporations flows from the "personhood"
| of the humans behind it.
|
| Imagine a world where corporations held no rights at all. For
| example, while an individual human had the right to freedom
| of the press, a corporation like the New York Times would not
| have that right.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A _company_ is made up of humans. a _corporation_ is a
| synthetic corpus created by legal dictum. It 's all in the
| name.
| 8note wrote:
| If corporations gain rights from the people involved, I
| don't think those same people should be exempted from
| liability for what they do as a group
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Despite the consistent misinformation around it (very
| frequently flat out lies), Corporate Personhood does not mean
| that corporations are people. Corporate Personhood only
| acknowledges that corporations are groups of people, and that
| if it would be legal to gather a large group to do something,
| doing so under the auspices of a corporation is also legal.
| That is the precedent that Citizens United set - That it is
| as legal to make political contributions and endorsements as
| a corporation as you would as a rotary club. You can argue
| that the rotary club shouldn't be allowed to make
| contributions - And I would agree with you. I in fact,
| encourage it. People should not be able to hide their
| political contributions through entities like Trade Unions,
| which are actually the most pertinent part of that class.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Much more likely us that there will be a push for patent
| rights to be granted to corporations, sidestepping the
| philosophy entirely.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I think that if we ever reach that breakthrough, then we can
| argue that an AGI deserves more rights than a non-AGI.
| shultays wrote:
| Can I patent/trademark the contents of Library of Babel
| (https://libraryofbabel.info/) and then sue everyone?
| williamtrask wrote:
| I'm very grateful for rulings like this. I think it's important
| that we all remember that progress isn't the goal. Humans
| flourishing is the goal. AI shouldn't be personified and add even
| more actors with legitimate ability to compete for resources.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps AI can't get a patent, but AI can still generate prior
| art and thus invalidate patents.
| lordlic wrote:
| Conscious beings flourishing is the goal, whether they be human
| or AI.
|
| That might seem like a fine distinction, but the importance
| going forward is stark given a quote from TFA:
|
| > The third judge, Lord Justice Birss, took a different view.
| While he agreed that "machines are not persons" ...
| williamtrask wrote:
| The goal of AI is not to create consciousness, it's to help
| humans. And we have no ability to prove/disprove
| consciousness in anything anyway but we choose to believe it
| exists because each of us knows it inside ourselves.
|
| If we create a box of metal, matrices, and silicone and tell
| ourselves it's conscious it will be our own hubris that leads
| to additional competition for shared resources and further
| human inequality/suffering. Such lines of reasoning make me
| very concerned.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the goal of
| AI".
|
| First, different researchers or their funders presumably
| have very different motivations. Compete with China, fire
| all our employees, become famous as an inventor, make lots
| of money, work on something interesting ...
|
| Second, at some point AI's are likely to have their own
| goals and "help humans" quite famously is not guaranteed to
| be their North Star.
| xvilka wrote:
| AI is not conscious being. Yet. In the future, once we have
| AGI - yes, these laws and society will need to change to
| accept them, rather than enslave. But currently AI is just a
| buzzword.
| pnt12 wrote:
| if we have AGI*
|
| Progress has boundaries and hits walls. Such a breakthrough
| in AI is not guaranteed to happen.
| worrycue wrote:
| > Conscious beings flourishing is the goal, whether they be
| human or AI.
|
| Would you still say that if said "conscious beings" were in a
| desperate struggle with humanity for scarce resources
| required to survive?
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Loosely related past threads:
|
| _Only Humans, Not AI Machines, Can Get a U.S. Patent, Judge
| Rules_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405333 - Sept
| 2021 (7 comments)
|
| _South Africa issues world's first patent listing AI as
| inventor_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27995313 - July
| 2021 (75 comments)
|
| _EPO and UKIPO Refuse AI-Invented Patent Applications_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990346 - Jan 2020 (39
| comments)
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| I find this activism litigation ,,let's throw a tantrum to get
| famous" cringeworthy. The law is pretty clear that an inventor
| has to be a human.
|
| Even companies cannot be assigned as inventors, i.e. ,,Apple" has
| 0 inventions. They can only be assigned the commercial rights to
| what a human invented.
|
| The correct way of course would be to lobby for a change in the
| law, via democratic means, if you really think an AI can invent
| something.
| sjy wrote:
| Stephen Thaler is filing junk patents in his own name, naming his
| software as the "inventor," and challenging the various patent
| offices when they reject his defective application form without
| examining its merits. As the dissenting judge said in the Court
| of Appeal, "if only Dr Thaler was not such an obsessive and,
| instead of calling DABUS the inventor, he named himself ... none
| of these problems would arise" [1].
|
| Thaler recently won the same argument in Australia [2], although
| an appeal is pending. His lapsed patent application (2019363177)
| can be found in IP Australia's online database [3]. Putting the
| legal question aside - whether Thaler's insistence on naming
| DABUS the inventor was fatally defective to the application - the
| patent application is pseudoscientific nonsense, not a sound
| basis for deep questions about the nature of ownership and
| invention.
|
| The patent claims two apparently unrelated inventions. It does
| not explain how they were identified by DABUS or identify any
| other connection between them. The first invention is a "food or
| beverage container" with the cross-section of a Koch snowflake,
| which supposedly allows for containers to stick to each other.
| The material used for this flexible, fractal surface is
| unspecified, but plastic, metal or "an elastomeric material" are
| suggested, along with "potentially flexible food product (for
| example pasta, dough, liquorice and so on." It is plausible that
| the text of this claim was generated by GPT-3.
|
| The second invention is a "neural-flame device for attracting
| enhanced attention," that is, an LED that blinks "at a frequency
| corresponding to approximately 4 Hz and a fractal dimension near
| 1/2." There is extensive citation of Thaler's own publications,
| none of which are in reputable peer-reviewed journals. What can
| be found online [4] fails to show that flickering LEDs have some
| useful neurological function, or explain what the patent
| application has to do with DABUS.
|
| [1]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2021/1374.pdf
|
| [2]:
| https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fc...
|
| [3]:
| http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDet...
|
| [4]:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...
| zw123456 wrote:
| I am a research fellow at a large tech company and part of my job
| is to produce a certain number of patents per year. I have used
| AI as an "aid" to developing a patent several times but never
| thought for one minute it would make sense to list AI as the
| inventor. That is ridiculous. I have used Excel, R, Google
| Search, Mathematica, Python and several other modeling tools etc.
| to develop new IPR, obviously no one would list any of those. It
| was me doing the inventing, I am just using tool like any other.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Actually this is one of the things I ask about during
| interviews up front if the answer is "yes" then I immediately
| ask them if that can be negotiated out of the employee
| agreement, otherwise I just politely end the interview and tell
| them I won't be a good candidate.
| km3r wrote:
| It's draws an interesting question though, at what point, if
| ever, does an AI system move beyond the scope of a tool and
| into the scope of an assistant? I don't think we are anywhere
| near that yet, but it's conceivable that we reach a point where
| that question needs to be answered.
| Ekaros wrote:
| When it can file for patent without prompt from anyone else
| and then argue in court for itself. And it wasn't build to do
| that.
| zw123456 wrote:
| When it can do my job for me without my boss knowing the
| difference :)
| foxpurple wrote:
| What would be the point of a program owning a patent? Is it
| going to charge you royalties for use? Where does that money
| go? If it gets it's own bank account, what happens when you
| run two instances of the same program? Do you split the
| account in half and then join it when one exits?
|
| It's all nonsensical anyway.
| jobigoud wrote:
| The second instance is a totally different entity and does
| not own the patent or bank account of the first, unless
| they decide to somehow merge their state-vectors and become
| a single entity.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I mean does it matter? Not like assistants get anything out
| of patents either. For the most part these days even the
| inventor pretty rarely gets most of the benefit from patents,
| they've usually signed it away before they even 'invented'
| the thing.
| iakh wrote:
| If any "inventor" is not listed as such on the patent, then
| it's another way to invalidate the patent. So while
| possibly not a benefit to the inventor, definitely good for
| the assignees to have clarity on the matter.
| [deleted]
| cable2600 wrote:
| Companies will do the same thing they do to IT staff that design
| things that need patents. They will put the manager's name on the
| patent because the product is owned by the company.
| advael wrote:
| This seems like the antebellum for an IP reckoning similar to
| what resulted in the DMCA in the United States in the late 90s.
| The technology is getting to the point where it makes the law as
| it stands pretty nonsensical in the face of what can be done
|
| The scope of patents in software and technology is already
| absurd, both because 12 years is an eternity for how quickly that
| industry moves, and because increasingly trivial "inventions"
| have been let through as the ability for patent officials to
| interpret complicated digital innovations according to patent law
| and policy has increasingly fallen behind the field. This is
| already a serious problem, but currently still takes expensive
| lawyers to take advantage of. Even if we make legal precedent
| that says that AI can't own patents, the advent of better
| purpose-specific text generation will quickly put patent trolling
| in the hands of laypeople
|
| Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The
| provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible
| precedent that led to the draconian control private companies
| exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified
| in law by their intellectual property concerns. I believe that if
| Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has
| now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I hope that this
| new challenge moves us more in this direction, rather than some
| new awful legislative band-aid that attempts to preserve the
| status quo by destroying more of our rights
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Technology has always been the bellwether of legislation.
| Personal automobiles brought along traffic laws. Firearms were
| regulated early and often. AI, and it's descendants will
| necessarily need legislation if they are of any consequence.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| _> Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The
| provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible
| precedent that led to the draconian control private companies
| exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified
| in law by their intellectual property concerns_
|
| A mistake, or a resounding success in achieving exactly what
| you mention? Do you really think the DMCA was passed with the
| people's interests in mind?
| advael wrote:
| Absolutely a fair point
| Avicebron wrote:
| says the dude who runs basic script and calls himself an ai
| genius, your not slick bro, your trash who thinks hes smart, we
| all ran limewire, and we know what your talking about, youre
| just a clown
| dang wrote:
| Whoa, personal attacks like that will get you banned here.
| Users need to stick to the rules regardless of how wrong
| another commenter is or you feel they are.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| In general I feel like patents have jumped the shark. Maybe
| they made sense when they applied to local jurisdictions as a
| means of growing local manufacturing capacity. But global
| patents just prevent huge numbers of people from innovating.
| People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more
| affordable for example, but huge restrictions are placed on how
| they can operate. They can't innovate to manufacture an
| existing drug cheaply using local materials because some
| multinational owns the patent. 3D printers are another example.
| In 1995 they were introduced under patent for $50,000 and ten
| years later the price was $25,000. In 2018 the patents expired
| and hobbyists got to work designing cheaper machines. Within
| three years a $2000 machine was decent and ten years after the
| patent expired $300 machines were available worldwide. Can you
| imagine how prosperous the whole world would be if they were
| permitted to copy the best available medical equipment, find
| effective ways to lower manufacturing costs as with the 3D
| printers, and then we had cheap high quality medical machinery
| available worldwide? This would be a revolution in global
| wealth growth with little cost to the existing wealthy
| countries. We would benefit from a more rapidly industrialized
| world with less direct investment required to make it happen,
| and we would benefit from more diversity of ideas.
|
| I really have to call out Bill Gates who said in 2021 "we can't
| just open source the vaccine because factories to make it don't
| exist the world over" but he would have been perfectly capable
| of making those investments in 2020 if what he really wanted
| was maximum vaccine production. He's thinking in top down
| systems and I really think we need to understand how effective
| bottom up engineering can be, as with 3D printers.
| drran wrote:
| You can make your own medicine at home in many countries, but
| safety testing takes years and costs hundreds of millions.
| After years of testing, when the result is good and the
| inventor is lucky, the inventor will have just a few years of
| protection to recoup costs.
|
| How you can improve that without patents?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I've just written a nearby comment that might answer your
| question.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664769
|
| See also a direct link to a chapter in an economics book
| about the subject: http://dklevine.com/papers/anew09.pdf
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But global patents just prevent huge numbers of people from
| innovating.
|
| Don't know why you're being downvoted. There are many
| concrete examples of this.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330810
|
| Patent circumvention actively leads to development of new
| industries in previously ignored locations, leading to
| prosperity for a huge number of people.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Patents are sufficiently abstract that most people believe
| the very basic story we are told about them and they don't
| ever learn the true details. It wasn't until I saw all the
| work engineering hobbyists did to advance 3D printing that
| I realized how many people are held back by patents. I do
| wish people would engage with comments instead of downvotes
| as I try to make good arguments.
| drran wrote:
| In case of 3D printers, patents worked as expected. 3
| different methods were invented, patented (opened to
| public with protection for 20 years), then patent are
| expired, and general public was able to fruit developed
| technology and advance it further.
|
| Just compare this to commercial secret practice.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You're describing the basic operation of a patent which
| is not in dispute. What I am saying is that the societal
| costs outweigh the benefits and despite the common
| belief, patents are not actually a net good for society.
| I describe this in more detail (including alternatives to
| secrecy) here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28659377
| naasking wrote:
| Commercial secret practices would have had 3D printers
| reverse engineered 20 years ago. So yes, maybe they
| worked as expected, but it's not clear the public
| benefitted more under that system.
| [deleted]
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| How long does it take to construct and staff a brand new
| vaccine production facility?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I don't know, but I know Bill Gates could do it faster than
| it has ever been done before if he wanted to. Also they
| could upgrade existing facilities rather than build brand
| new ones. For example there are facilities I've heard of in
| India and South America which claim they could manufacture
| the mRNA vaccines. If the details of the vaccine were
| shared early on and they had help from Gates, I imagine
| these facilities could have been producing them by now.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more
| affordable for example
|
| well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize
| and allow the original inventor a monopoly for a period of
| time to earn back time risk and the development costs, and
| that monopoly is going to come with higher prices.
|
| it's the point of a patent, you can't very well say that
| patents undermine the ability to undermine them: it's
| nonsensical!
|
| I'm not defending patents nor saying we need them, I'm simply
| saying you can't say "patents don't work because they do what
| they were designed to"
| randombits0 wrote:
| You are confusing the "why" and the "how".
|
| "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by
| securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
| exclusive right to their respective writings and
| discoveries."
|
| If the end result of a patent does not promote the progress
| of science and the useful arts, it undermines the core
| purpose of patents.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I am not disputing that patents provide the recognized
| inventor a period of monopoly rights which allow that
| person higher profits for the patent period. What I argue
| is that this system as implemented does not actually
| increase the rate of innovation as we are typically told. I
| argue that in fact this system dramatically slows the rate
| of innovation. This occurs because every patent benefits
| one individual while a thousand others are now prevented
| from discovery along the same lines as the awarded patent.
| A system without patents would see more market competition
| among motivated inventors as one good idea cannot carve a
| moat around any particular concept. You can see a real
| world example of capitalists competing without patents in
| China, and the result is rapid innovation. Here is a
| written first hand account from a respected hacker and
| engineer. [1]
|
| So with both open source and with Shanzai you see that
| large numbers of people are often motivated to work on the
| same problem. The function of patents is to prevent those
| people from pursuing forks of good ideas. This is why 3D
| printers had gone down in price by 50% after ten years
| under patent, but in the ten years after the patent expired
| they went from $25000 to $300 (1.2%). A multitude of
| curious people will make more engineering progress than one
| well funded group with a powerful legal monopoly. This is
| my claim about an under appreciated aspect of patents and
| this has been discussed in scholarly literature. [2]
|
| A common question I hear relates to funding. People say no
| one will make investments if someone else can copy their
| work. But I argue this does not mean investment will cease,
| but that the nature of investment would change. Broadly it
| would change from fewer larger investments to more frequent
| smaller investments. One quarter you get a boost of funding
| to beat the competition to market, next quarter they copy
| you but then you copy them back and the cat and mouse game
| continues. This is actually true capitalist market
| competition. [3]
|
| So my argument is that patents do not actually accelerate
| innovation as we are told, but they actually slow down the
| rate of innovation. And it makes sense: the sole purpose of
| a patent is to limit innovation for everyone but the patent
| holder. We were raised on the story that the secondary
| effects are positive, but that story is not so simple.
|
| Finally, I will say that secrecy can be punished and
| openness can be enforced. If we all understand how
| important open source is to rapid innovation, we can make
| public commitments to boycott those companies and fund
| efforts to reverse engineer their work. It's already the
| case that open source projects avoid proprietary modules as
| much as possible. We could do this as a society for all
| goods.
|
| [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
|
| [2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/hoSWC_6mDCk
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| What I am saying about patents is that the supposed
| benefits are vastly outweighed by the drawbacks. I believe
| the reason they continue to be popular is that patents
| benefit large industry players to the detriment of everyone
| else, but since they have strong influence over policy in
| the USA and the USA has strong policy influence the world
| over, we are all suffering for the perceived benefits of
| patents.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Patents benefit the inventor (or at least they did until
| 2013) through compensation for their efforts and society
| as a whole through disclosure of information. The
| alternative is that every bit of applicable knowledge is
| kept as a trade secret.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You frame this as a binary: patents or trade secrets. But
| other options include authorized copying (open source)
| and copying without express permission (Shanzai
| style)[1]. As I mentioned in my original comment, both of
| those modes of development played a crucial role in
| lowering the price of 3D printers as well as increasing
| volume. By 2008, Stratasys had shipped 16,000 3D printers
| in the company history. Now Prusa Research ships that
| many printers in one month. And Prusa is fully open
| source and always has been. So clearly trade secrets are
| not the only alternative to patents.
|
| You must understand, when one inventor gets rights over
| something, now 1000 other inventors working in a similar
| field cannot easily build on that idea. So one person
| benefits while 1000 others are restricted. But the market
| already rewards innovators, so why stop those 1000 would-
| be innovators because one person filed all the right
| paperwork?
|
| And because people always mention this: investment would
| still work. Instead of a $10m investment for a big five
| year project, the investments would be smaller and more
| frequent. Improve the product and impress buyers with the
| next version. Is it a flop? Someone else will clone your
| failed version with the necessary improvements, and next
| year they will get the investment. Product development
| happens faster because no one can rest on their laurels,
| and cost of living goes down because no one can charge a
| very high price for something that can be cloned for
| cheap.
|
| That faster innovation and lower cost of living is
| obviously a huge benefit to moving away from patents.
| This is also a fact rarely acknowledged by those who
| believe in the standard story about the purpose and
| benefits of patents. There's billions of people on Earth
| who need the knowledge we have locked up in patent
| portfolios. We must not be careless with how we consider
| this policy. There is a lot at stake.
|
| [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
| secondaryacct wrote:
| "DCMA" "worldwide"... dude I know the US feels big, but it's a
| tiny part of the global jurisdiction. In my country google
| isn't even available. Where I grew up, software patents were
| banned and right to copy very protected.
|
| Stop thinking it's a global problem: just like the regular
| murder of children at school by other children, it's a very
| american problem. You can absolutely fix it yourself.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately, most US problems actually _are_ problems for
| the entire Western world. The US tends to export its problems
| - sometimes on the backs of nuclear aircraft carriers (e.g.
| DMCA and other IP-related regulations, financial
| regulations), sometimes through culture (e.g. US issues
| bleeding through to European activists, even though those
| issues don 't exist here, or are nowhere near as
| problematic).
| slim wrote:
| Where did you grew up?
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| This comment just reads as "I find Americans or American-
| related politics annoying".
|
| It's particularly ironic on HN; Internet companies are world
| wide, and the DMCA is used by them frequently. The OP was
| entirely accurate with his wording, and you're very off base
| here.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a
| legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be
| dismantled.
|
| Completely agree. Intellectual property in general needs to be
| abolished. Copyright in particular is irredeemable at this
| point.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| I know it's a little unrelated to the article at hand, but you
| mention a lot about DMCA being a mistake, so as someone who
| doesn't know a lot about it and it being an interesting topic,
| could you tell us more about why that is?
| advael wrote:
| I posted some explanation as a reply to AmericanChopper below
| that I think is a good summary of my take on this
| stefan_ wrote:
| If only anyone would actually do DMCA? YouTube, Twitch et al
| pretend to have a "DMCA strike system" but in fact they are
| trying to co-opt the term for "we have entirely bowed to the
| demands of producers" and instituted systems that have nothing
| to do with DMCA.
|
| Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition,
| I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. There is
| no "three strikes" or "YouTube sides with the content producer
| instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all.
|
| There are basically only two fixes needed for DMCA: 1) legal
| liability for false or fraudulent DMCA notices, ideally with
| punitive damages; 2) platforms that do pretend-DMCA for
| removing user generated content incur the liability for their
| actions.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA.
|
| > Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music
| composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that
| is it.
|
| Although I agree that there could be problems if a system has
| no counter-claim process (although, I think that this claim
| of your is factually incorrect. I think youtube has
| counterclaims, even for its "fake" DMCAs), I think that you
| have strongly mis-interpreted the motivations for having
| "fake" DMCA processes.
|
| The motivations for having fake DMCAs, is that if someone
| doesn't get a real DMCA, then there is no longer any legal
| obligation to perma-ban someone for being a "repeat"
| infringer.
|
| This draconian, repeat infringer policy, which many platforms
| have, is bad for everyone. And getting around it helps
| creators.
|
| > "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your
| counter notice" in DMCA at all.
|
| I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a
| counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the
| counterclaim.
| wtallis wrote:
| > I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is
| a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the
| counterclaim.
|
| Not if it's the counter-claim in their non-DMCA process.
| judge2020 wrote:
| YouTube has its own systems because the music studios always
| have a trick up their sleeve if YT doesn't dance: they can
| just stop uploading MVs to YouTube. That's 25% of all views
| on the platform[0]. I'm sure Spotify would love to take all
| of those.
|
| 0: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/09/15/youtube-music-
| vi...
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >they can just stop uploading MVs to YouTube.
|
| What, and stop being able to get free advertising on what
| is effectively the largest audio streaming website on the
| internet? In an actually free market, any media company
| that tried this would immediately get eclipsed by the rest.
|
| But instead, we have a small number of record conglomerates
| that have formed a trust to bully everyone else to play on
| their terms, and the US gov refuses to trust-bust until it
| starts becoming a threat to their political power.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| >What, and stop being able to get free advertising on
| what is effectively the largest audio streaming website
| on the internet?
|
| Not just free advertising. A damn lot of these music
| videos are "monetized", and about of half the ad revenue
| goes to the studios (if and how much of that money is
| passed on to the artists... that's another question).
|
| Youtube should do proper DMCA, I fully agree, at least
| when it comes to the notice-counternotice-lawsuit process
| defined by the law.
|
| However, it's not as easy. The DMCA is law in the United
| States, but - surprisingly to some (I have dealt with
| processing DMCA notices and similar, not for
| Youtube/Google tho) - it is not a law elsewhere and other
| nations have their own laws. Even the question of what
| happens when there is a dispute and party A is in the US
| and party B is e.g. in Germany is not that easy... Not
| even what jurisdiction Youtube itself then falls under.
| Browsing Youtube from Germany gives an imprint that
| states that the service is provided by Google Ireland
| Limited (the EU mothership) but also mentions the legal
| department of Google Germany GmbH (the German
| subsidiary). Youtube has been sued in German courts over
| copyright before (e.g. the GEMA case), and Youtube did
| show up because if they had ignored it instead they would
| have risked losing the entire German market, if not the
| EU market.
|
| The kafka-esque system they have right now - with three
| strikes, ContentID, reporting made extremely easy for
| alleged copyright owners, challenging these reports made
| difficult and black box for the channel owners - is most
| likely a result of their legal department pushing for the
| global lowest common denominator of any jurisdiction they
| care about with the smallest risk of Youtube being sued
| and found liable for user conduct in those jurisdictions.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Well, two tricks. The other one is massive lawsuit against
| YouTube for no longer "doing enough" to prevent copyright
| infringement. Viacom v. YouTube started in 2007, was
| reversed several times, and really only ended because they
| settled, the settlement being secret but I'd guess probably
| directly lead to ContentID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V
| iacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
| advael wrote:
| The provisions you describe are a minor inconvenience
| compared to the sweeping provision that criminalizes
| circumvention of anything that could be construed as DRM
| sandworm101 wrote:
| We miss the underlying problem, the real motivations behind
| this push towards AI-inventors. AI inventors are owned
| entities. Anything "invented" by them would be wholly owned by
| whatever entity owns or controls the AI. Allowing this could
| open the door to everyday software tools becoming co-authors.
|
| Scenario: Microsoft owns copyright over AI and makes AI
| available as part of windows. Are all "inventions" made using
| windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? Nobody
| would say that Microsoft should get rights to a book because
| the author using Word's spellchecker, but what about an AI-
| based translator program? Is the AI a co-author? If so,
| Microsoft could argue that it is a part owner of everything
| created using an AI-enabled MSword.
|
| Scenario: Photographer takes picture of mountain. They get
| copyright because the contributed to the setting up of the
| camera. They pick the scene and they pushed the button. But new
| AI camera, with AI trained on all the best photographs, is now
| in control. Autofocus does not make the camera a creator, but
| an AI that has a hand in every detail of the photograph? An AI
| that is legally allowed to be a copyright owner? Is every
| photograph now a joint work between human and AI? There are
| lots of iPhone cameras out there. What is Apple's stance on AI
| creators?
| OliverJones wrote:
| Yeah. Those of us who patent stuff when employed are pretty
| darn close to "owned entities." Part of the filing process is
| assigning the patent rights to the employer.
|
| Can an AI sign a patent assignment document or a work-for-
| hire contract? What would it mean for an AI to sign such a
| document "freely"?
|
| And, Michaelangelo used some tech (scaffolding) while
| painting the ceiling of that chapel (Sistine) where the
| catholic bishops hang out while choosing a new bishop of
| Rome. Reliable scaffolding was certainly enabling tech for
| that project. It doesn't mean the scaffolding gets a credit.
| [deleted]
| flimflamm wrote:
| " Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially
| created/owned by Microsoft? "
|
| I suppose that depends on what crafty Microsoft lawyers have
| written to the contracts. I would assume no. It's a tool
| which is in the possession of the person who bought the
| license from Microsoft.
| elcomet wrote:
| Nobody would use Word if the terms of service said that
| Microsoft will be co-owner of everything you write
| swarnie wrote:
| You have too much faith in humanity
|
| I bet a billion people getting word bundled with O365 would
| still use it, mostly because no one would have read page
| 3456 of the ToS and wouldn't know any better.
|
| Some nerd packs online would scream it from the rooftops
| but 98% of the population wouldn't care.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Bigger enterprises would have a problem, and ultimately
| its big enterprise that drives adoption of Microsoft
| products. Everyone else uses it because everyone else
| uses it.
| chii wrote:
| if Word made writing so much easier that not using meant
| not being able to write at all, then they would agree to
| this TOS to use Word.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also the degree of co-ownership matters. It might start
| with something small, like 1% of all royalties if > 100k
| USD, or a limited non-compete. Not enough to scare people
| off, enough to normalize the practice. Over time, the
| scope of co-ownership could be gradually increased, and
| it'll be harder to fight it off, as any pushback will be
| discussed in terms of particular conditions of a
| particular company, instead of pushing back on the whole
| business model.
| mdale wrote:
| I look at the cloud switching costs or entrenched
| asymmetrical relationship of selling "software" in cloud
| first environment.
|
| Startups are already in this boat of growing percentage
| of value created allocated to the platforms of
| distribution or systems that the ideas runs on.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a
| legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be
| dismantled.
|
| I understand that this is HN and not Congress, but I would also
| hope that any Government body that is seriously considering
| this would do a thorough review before passing laws to this
| effect.
|
| We read articles all the time about patent trolls abusing Texan
| courthouses to hold real engineers to ransom, and innovation
| being blocked by patent holders successfully arguing that an
| obvious innovation was non-obvious (e.g. RED's patent on
| compressed RAW data), but I don't think many people here would
| be familiar with the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law
| which probably, for the most part, works fairly well.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > works fairly well.
|
| Here's a case I randomly ran across 20 years ago. Sun had
| recently patented a sequence of three assembly instructions.
| At the time I read about it, I'd also been reading a 1987
| paper that presented that same "invention", and not as a core
| result, but as an example in an appendix. It had been found
| by the author's superoptimizer, a kind of brute-force "AI"
| (to bring it back closer to this thread).
|
| Just to tighten the screws, the lawyer writing the patent put
| in this passage:
|
| > While embodiments and applications of this invention have
| been shown and described, it would be apparent to those
| skilled in the art that many more modifications than
| mentioned above are possible without departing from the
| inventive concepts herein. The invention, therefore, is not
| to be restricted except in the spirit of the appended claims.
|
| So they didn't just appropriate those three lines of old
| assembly, they made a grab at everything in its neighborhood.
| And it was granted.
|
| The only part of this that _especially_ surprised me was the
| coincidence of having that paper fresh in memory just when
| this patent came up in some discussion online.
|
| (Source: https://darius.livejournal.com/8835.html)
| kragen wrote:
| The day-to-day mundane aspects of "IP" law* do "work fairly
| well," yes, but their purpose is not to benefit the public,
| and as it happens, they do not benefit the public. There are
| spectacular cases where they cause great and spectacular
| damage to the public like those you mention, while in the
| common day-to-day cases they cause less damage, or in any
| case subtler damage. Occasionally they provide a public
| benefit, but in those cases they are malfunctioning, and
| often such cases get fixed.
|
| Fundamentally, the operation of "intellectual property" is to
| treat your intellect as someone else's property under the
| law. By granting economic monopolies to private companies in
| particular goods, such as the sale of copies of _1984_, the
| government converts the abundance provided by our modern
| machinery into artificial scarcity, thus providing those
| companies with monopoly profits. The rationale given for this
| is that it provides an incentive to create those goods in the
| first place, but where economists have analyzed these
| incentives quantitatively, it invariably results that the
| monopoly rights currently granted cause enormously more harm
| to the public than the extra production they propel.
|
| ______
|
| * "Intellectual property" is a fairly incoherent group of
| laws that it rarely makes sense to discuss collectively. Here
| I mean copyrights, patents, trade secrets, sui generis
| database protection, and noncompete agreements, rather than
| trademarks, mask works, and privacy.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Sweeping patent trolls aside, the rapid industrial and
| technological progression of China seems like a good argument
| for (at least temporarily) suspending IP regimes in order to
| facilitate periods of accelerated advancement that permit new
| combinations of otherwise legally locked-down technologies
| and cultural artifacts.
| beecafe wrote:
| Dog eat dog vs dog entrench power (and not be eaten)
| cycomanic wrote:
| We should have such a review no matter what. We always call
| for these reviews when people want to change things, but
| should we not also review old practices which where never
| reviewed before?
| advael wrote:
| I don't buy it. I know people who have worked for patent
| firms, and independent artists who have tried in vain to
| enforce the rights they're supposed to have when someone
| sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking,
| attributing, or paying for it. Industries from software to
| biotech to agricultural equipment have been abusing patents
| for decades, and the lawyers involved all know that the name
| of the game is to go as broad and nebulous as possible to as
| to lock down huge swaths of potential applications of some
| general principle. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are
| even perversely incentivized to rush new, exotic, poorly-
| understood chemicals and genetic variants of plants to market
| and capture prescribers because they can enforce monopolies
| about it, or patent the treatment of new conditions with
| public-domain drugs. Where exactly is IP law functioning
| well?
| bdowling wrote:
| The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right
| does not mean that IP law is an outright failure and should
| be abolished. By that logic, disputes over who committed a
| crime would mean that criminal law is an outright failure
| and should be abolished.
|
| The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right
| means that IP rights are important and valuable and are
| therefore worth fighting about.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But these constant court disputes mean that it moves some
| technologies outside of the realm of regular people. If
| Apple gets a patent for "Display with Pixel Dimming for
| Curved Edges" then regular people and smaller companies
| can't use that even if Apple's patent is nonsense. You
| can only afford to fight off so many lawsuits and still
| continue doing your original work.
| bdowling wrote:
| Most individuals and small companies should(*) just
| ignore patents they think are invalid because in almost
| all cases either (a) the patent is actually invalid and
| the patent owner won't actually litigate it or (b) the
| patent is valid but much narrower in scope than they
| think it is. Every patent I've seen held up here on HN as
| an example of an overly-broad, clearly invalid patent has
| had much narrower claims than the presenter admits.
|
| (*) I am a lawyer, but not your lawyer. This is a general
| observation and not legal advice. Your actual case will
| be different.
| [deleted]
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without
| asking, attributing, or paying for it
|
| The rest of your comment is talking about patents. Was this
| person's art patented?
| advael wrote:
| Irrelevant. The comment I was responding to said the
| following:
|
| "...I don't think many people here would be familiar with
| the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law which probably,
| for the most part, works fairly well."
|
| I am responding directly to that claim, and have used as
| examples situations involving patents and situations
| involving copyright, with the intention of conveying that
| there is not a single facet of this whole area of law
| that seems to function well in practice unless your
| interests are aligned with monopolistic corporate power.
| Most examples of it not being that bad are examples of it
| simply not coming up
| [deleted]
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I can understand why this is an unpopular take with this
| community regarding IP rights. Despite this being a valid
| opinion I'm noticing a lot of people complaining with their
| downvote button instead of an argument.
| rasen58 wrote:
| There's a down vote button on HN? I only ever see only the
| upvote one
| david_allison wrote:
| You need 501 karma
|
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-
| undocumented#downvo...
| [deleted]
| thereisnospork wrote:
| I can only speak for myself but I find it to be a banal
| position[0], not worthy of serious argument or discussion. It
| is also both broad and over reaching to a degree that implies
| that a reasonable discussion will not be had and is an
| aggressive tangent from the article topic: 'moron[1] tries to
| argue that his 'AI' is sentient and therefore capable of
| being an inventor'.
|
| [0]Roughly the equivalent of 'I believe that if <Fiat
| Currency> ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run
| its course and needs to be dismantled. <Because of
| Bitcoin/crypto>'
|
| [1]Derision intended
| advael wrote:
| I agree, and my strong stance against IP as a legal principle
| in general is extremely unpopular in just about any circle I
| talk to. I nonetheless think it's both correct and important.
| I think people have bought pretty heavily into the rhetoric
| surrounding the value of IP: That it exists to protect the
| rights of creators. As far as I can tell, there are three
| major problems with this
|
| 1. IP assignment is overwhelmingly not retained by the
| creator of any work covered by IP. The vast overwhelming
| majority of engineers, for example, have in their contract of
| employment assigned all rights to any IP they generate in
| their work to the company they work for. The same is true of
| artists who contract with distributors
|
| 2. Independent creators often have no ability to successfully
| defend their IP claims, because said claims require expensive
| litigation, the cases are never straightforward enough for a
| summary judgement, and the individual nature of the claims
| mean that a class action lawsuit is nearly always infeasible
|
| 3. The way that IP law has been interpreted, especially under
| the DMCA, is incredibly abusable. The early history of the
| DMCA saw massive lawsuits filed by corporations against
| individuals based on obviously ridiculous numbers calculated
| as "potential lost sales" using flimsy evidence. A whole new
| business model of tech patent trolling has created a cottage
| industry that makes as many spurious claims as it can in
| order to leech money from businesses without producing
| anything of value. The current reading of the DMCA stymies
| users' attempts to repair their devices or even protect their
| privacy, because they can be criminally liable for attempts
| to modify devices that can be argued to be partially acting
| as DRM mechanisms, sometimes on the code running on the
| device itself.
|
| When we talk about the value of a law or policy, the _intent_
| of the law is at best a diagnostic tool for an untested new
| kind of attempt at something. At the end of the day, it doesn
| 't matter what a policy or law intends, it matters what the
| effects of the law are when interpreted and enforced.
| Intellectual Property as a legal paradigm generally is
| malfunctioning in a lot of places that harm people, harm
| society, and fail to uphold its promise. I think that the
| concept of ownership over ideas as a whole is at this phase
| in humman history doing much, much more harm than good, and
| needs to be eroded and eventually abolished from law
|
| As for how creative people can make money off of their work
| in an environment without IP, there's actually a pretty clear
| answer for this that is not even my observation. Most
| creative work right now is paid for at production, not based
| on IP rights. The engineers working at a company are paid for
| their time and labor, and sign over the IP they produce.
| Independent artists work on commissions, and at a larger
| scale, crowdfund their projects. It is only the occasionally
| very established and wealthy artist or inventor that can
| really take advantage of IP laws, and their beneficiaries are
| as it stands mostly large corporations, treating IP as
| effectively a dragon hoard of speculative assets they can
| monetize through litigation and threats thereof. Most of the
| effect of this is stifling, not encouraging, independent
| innovation
|
| Also, international agreements like the WTO have put the
| entire globe in a worse situation with regards to COVID
| vaccines - which need rapid, global distribution to be
| effective - because of patent rights over those vaccines.
| While many vaccines have resulted from a large amount of
| public funding, the IP controlling their production is
| largely in the hands of private corporations which view non-
| affiliated production of vaccines as cutting into their
| bottom line. They not only refuse to share the know-how to
| ramp up production with organizations trying to build up this
| capability worldwide, but have threatened to actively shut
| down such efforts if they happen anyway. This is obviously
| terrible for humanity as a whole, as we are currently in a
| situation where existing production and distribution is
| inadequate to keep ahead of variant evolution
| omginternets wrote:
| You've convincingly shown that current IP law fails to
| fulfill its intended purpose. But this is very different
| from the _principle_ of intellectual property being
| undesirable.
|
| What justifies your stronger claim that IP itself should be
| done away with?
| advael wrote:
| This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that
| ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in
| the first place, which is why people generally only
| justify IP with rose-tinted ideas about its intended
| practical effects. Here are some major reasons I think it
| doesn't make sense:
|
| 1. We understand that ideas build on each other. It has
| always worked this way, and it is overwhelmingly the way
| humans get things done. Every scientific discovery stands
| on the shoulders of giants. Every story or song is
| influenced by ones that came before it. Creativity is
| valuable, but to define the entirety of a creative
| endeavor as undeniably the effort of a single person is
| insane. Because creativity builds on other creativity,
| any legal concept that tries to parcel out unique
| contributions of individuals or groups and impose a
| tariff on them is likely to stifle innovation, because
| any time it actually comes to matter, it can only create
| an unnatural block on a creative effort
|
| 2. Most people who have worked in a creative field
| understand that a concept or idea is seldom of much
| value, and must be executed in some way to be meaningful.
| Various concepts of intellectual property even try to
| capture this, e.g. by granting rights over performances
| or recordings specifically. The best arguments I've heard
| for "intellectual property" abstractly are as an interim
| solution for allowing collaborations to produce economic
| value for the person who didn't control the distribution,
| but this essentially can't function if we treat these
| rights as "property", because property entails the right
| to transfer this property, creating a mechanism to
| effectively void these rights.
|
| 3. Attribution is a valuable ethical principle, and
| giving people due credit for their ideas is an important
| part of creative endeavors from science to music, but
| property rights are simply not the correct framework to
| legislate this with. False claims of attribution can be
| fraud or sometimes defamation, and attribution can be
| proven by the well-understood mechanism of demonstrable
| prior art. Proof of prior art is more technologically
| feasible to ensure in an era where we have cryptographic
| signatures to uniquely prove authenticity and the ability
| to easily publish something with a timestamp to an
| archive
| naasking wrote:
| You have it backwards: why should we permit people to
| claim ownership of ideas at all? We arguably have a
| natural right to mimic what we see others do, or apply
| the ideas that other teach us, or retell the stories that
| others told us. What a backwards world we live in where
| we have to justify exercising our natural rights.
| omginternets wrote:
| >You have it backwards: why should we permit people to
| claim ownership of ideas at all?
|
| I don't think that's fair. I'm responding to a claim that
| IP is "wrong". The parent poster purported to demonstrate
| why this is so, and had not done this. The burden of
| proof is not on me.
| naasking wrote:
| Since you agreed with the OP that IP is no longer
| achieving it's stated goals, then the original reasons
| justifying the restrictions of our natural rights no
| longer hold and thus our natural rights take precedence.
| The burden for establishing continued restrictions is
| clear.
|
| You spoke of principles, but I think you got them
| backwards, and thus sought to clarify what the actual
| underlying principles are.
| whatever1 wrote:
| But then how will private rnd work? Why would i spend 5
| years researching something when you can just copy it the
| next day?
| syshum wrote:
| I think you need to prove your claim that rnd would not
| work with out strong IP law. or that innovation would
| stop because of it
|
| In reality we have TONS of examples of competition and
| rnd coming AFTER something loses IP protection
|
| Everything from Movies to 3D printers can be cited as
| examples of this, Countless movies are based on Public
| Domain characters, books, and other works that have
| entered the public domain, and there is a strong case to
| be made that the reason studios keep remaking the same
| movies is because TONS of creative works are locked up in
| IP hell, there is a HUGE public domain hole due to
| increasing copy right lengths
|
| For patents, look no further than 3d printers. The tech
| was there for 20+ years, locked away in various patents.
| The second those patents expired the industry exploded
| with innovation and plenty of companies investing all
| kinds of capital in 3d printers...
| advael wrote:
| How it already works: Arrange to get paid to do it by
| someone, or find a way to monetize it. The uniqueness of
| an idea is not what you're actually selling even in the
| current context, and the idea that you can go do some R&D
| as an individual with no funding and then stop a massive
| corporation from "stealing" that idea and productizing it
| with IP is a fantasy at best.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Most basic scientific research is done at public
| universities financed by federal grants from the NIH,
| NSF, etc. U.S. Bayh-Dole law allows universities to
| exclusively license this taxpayer-financed research (it's
| a complete ripoff of the public).
|
| For example, in the pharmaceutical world, basic drug
| discoveries made at universities are transferred to large
| corporations who typically finance further clinical drug
| trials, before getting approval and marketing the drug.
|
| Note also, this creates pressure to push the new patented
| expensive drugs, even if much cheaper out-of-patent drugs
| work just as well.
|
| Also, a lot of industrial R&D is about improving in-house
| processes. This kind of research may or may not produce
| 'intellectual property' but it tends to reduce costs and
| improve efficiency.
|
| Ideas are cheap, don't let the monopolists corral them
| all and prevent independent technologies from
| flourishing.
| whatever1 wrote:
| The whole pharma industry relies on IP and patent law. No
| generic drug company is putting money for RnD, they just
| try to minimize production costs. It's the companies who
| rely on the protections of the law for exclusivity that
| put the money for rnd and take the risk.
|
| Pharmaceutical production costs are close to zero. It's
| the funding of a research pipeline that mostly fails that
| concentrates all of the costs. If Pfizer spent 10 years
| on research and clinical trials of a new drug, and I can
| the next day of the FDA approval produce a generic
| derivative of their drug, I will drive them out of
| business. My costs are essentially 0.
|
| And no, not all innovation has been produced by
| universities.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The vast majority of basic research that leads to
| patented drug development is done n the public dime, so
| it should belong to the public.
| whatever1 wrote:
| That is trivialization of the RnD required even after you
| have prediscovered a potent molecule. After that you need
| additional 6-10 years of development work & clinical
| trials (which btw have very high probability of failure)
| for which neither universities nor generic drug companies
| want to pay.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I think you're misrepresenting what the intention of IP
| laws are. Their intention is to incentivise IP to be made
| publicly available. I don't think it's especially relevant
| whether the person who did the work creating the IP retains
| ownership of it, or whether the party that funded the work
| they did creating it has ownership. There's nothing wrong
| with the idea that somebody can be employed to create IP
| for their employer.
|
| I agree with you that the law is dysfunctional in many
| ways. I especially agree with you that a law should be
| judged on the outcomes it creates rather than the intent of
| the policy that motivates it. But I'd suggest the
| appropriate solution is to improve the law, rather than
| abolishing IP rights.
|
| Without IP rights, we'd just return to industrial trade
| secrets, which would only really benefit big business. You
| would see much less investment in areas where trade secrets
| are not possible (like most pharmaceutical research for
| instance). A lot of people already think current-day DRM
| controls are anti-consumer, but how does a cinema-only
| movie release sound?
| advael wrote:
| I don't think it can function, and I think trade secrets
| are frankly quite weak. In practice, trade secrets don't
| usually stand up to sophisticated reverse-engineering
| efforts, and patents frequently and consistently fail to
| disclose implementation details that are important to how
| something works.
|
| As for art and media, the DMCA had a real problem to
| solve: The business models of the massive distribution
| conglomerates that had arisen when publishing and copying
| information was expensive were infeasible in the face of
| digital computers that could copy any information with
| high fidelity and distribute it over the internet. This
| business model should have collapsed in the face of this
| technology. The market would have been forced to adjust
| to some new model, e.g. crowdfunding (as has, again,
| already happened in even relatively large endeavors
| considered "independent" because they are not backed by a
| massive conglomerate). Instead, the market's status quo
| was prioritized. What needed to happen was for the market
| to equillibrate to the new reality of these technologies,
| and it's insane to view the "piracy" fights of the 90s as
| anything other than that process. DRM controls were, as a
| technology, a zero-sum game played by distributors
| against consumers, and some of them should - by any
| reasonable interpretation of laws against malicious
| access to a device owned by someone else - be illegal.
| Criminalization of circumventing DRM is a horrible
| monster of a law that puts a heavy criminal thumb on the
| scale in this conflict, prevented the market from
| equilibrating in favor of consumers or even new players
| trying new business models in any way, and cemented the
| dominance of existing players by fiat, giving them the
| backing of a police state to effectively enforce their
| business models as law
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > This business model should have collapsed in the face
| of this technology. The market would have been forced to
| adjust to some new model
|
| This very obviously did occur, though perhaps not as
| quickly as it might have otherwise. The market of CD and
| DVD sales has absolutely collapsed, and streaming
| services have taken over, regardless of that fact that
| this was initially resisted by the industry. But this new
| paradigm, which offers a much better product to
| consumers, is only possible because of IP rights. Piracy
| is no longer the existential threat to this industry that
| it once was, because legally licensed content has been
| able to offer a superior user experience (in most cases).
| But if I was allowed to set up a Netflix clone, host
| anything I wanted on it, and undercut their prices, then
| capital allocation to content creation would evaporate
| immediately. The thing you're trying to promote access to
| simply doesn't exist without these protections, and those
| protections don't prevent anybody from crowdsourcing
| something if they want to.
|
| > In practice, trade secrets don't usually stand up to
| sophisticated reverse-engineering efforts, and patents
| frequently and consistently fail to disclose
| implementation details that are important to how
| something works.
|
| The ubiquity of out-of-patent technology in the market
| place seems to undermine the idea that the public doesn't
| benefit from capital allocated to IP R&D. You don't have
| to think about it for very long to realize that without
| these protections, allocating capital to innovate
| production and synthesis processes that can be maintained
| a secret becomes the most appealing investment for
| capital that would otherwise be going to patentable R&D.
|
| A stance against IP protections in general is extremely
| fringe and extremely short sighted. If a system has
| problems, advocating for abolishing the entire thing
| isn't very sensible, especially when it's a system that
| has already provided so much benefit to society.
|
| You might hypothesize that those benefits would have been
| realized even without that system. But that hypothesis
| doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny, especially when
| we know for a fact that the value this system has created
| is directly quantifiable.
| advael wrote:
| I don't think there's strong evidence that piracy even
| _was_ an existential threat in practice, but regardless
| the new business models that have emerged are in fact far
| worse value propositions for consumers that want to be
| able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen to,
| access said things ever again without a continued
| subscription, or be able to find media that doesn 't
| require being spied on by some company to use. It's also
| a worse value proposition for artists, who receive much
| worse pay for works on streaming services exactly because
| their reach is so massive, and they can spread their risk
| out across lots of artists and markets by making it much
| harder to make a living off their services for said
| artists. Technology will always change how business is
| done, but right now, the law is playing a role that makes
| that shift more toward companies having strong controls
| over and surveillance of their customers that can't even
| legally be circumvented in the name of protection of IP.
| A business model like BandCamp could easily have worked
| without the DMCA. A business model like Netflix couldn't,
| but I don't really consider that a good thing
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > the new business models that have emerged are in fact
| far worse value propositions for consumers that want to
| be able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen
| to
|
| I think the market has demonstrated that this isn't what
| most consumers actually want. But in any case, the anti-
| piracy provisions of the DMCA are so weak, that anybody
| who wants to can still pirate with almost absolute
| impunity. I personally think the anti-circumvention
| provisions violate the 1st amendment. But it's hard to
| say this is a significant regulatory failure, because you
| can avoid the issue entirely by calling any circumvention
| tools you produce something other than circumvention
| tools.
|
| The issues with existing IP laws are readily apparent to
| me, but this doesn't extend to an argument against IP as
| a concept in general. Lots of regulatory systems have
| shortcomings, but it's a significant leap to conclude
| that they can't be improved.
|
| There are example of things that can't be effectively
| regulated, without causing significant harm to society. A
| lot of people would say that illicit drug consumption
| falls into this category. But in this case the harm
| caused by the regulation, and it's shortcomings in
| actually providing much benefit is very straightforward.
| There's really no comparing a situation like that, and
| the issues created by existing IP laws. In my anecdotal
| experience, most of the people who take a broad anti-IP
| stance also tend to hold anti-private property positions
| in general.
| advael wrote:
| What consumers currently use isn't evidence of what they
| want, it's evidence of what they want out of what's
| available to them. The widespread "piracy" epidemic was
| also pretty good evidence of revealed preference, and I
| doubt it would have changed so much if not for the
| draconian crackdowns on people without the tech savvy to
| get around enforcement.
|
| I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't
| fulfilling its purpose, the burden is on the concept of
| IP to demonstrate that it is a valuable legal concept,
| and all extant implementations simply fail to correctly
| realize it. Since we're playing the game of making wild
| extrapolative comparisons to arguments we haven't made,
| your line of argumentation reminds me of kids who balk at
| using the Soviet Union as an example for pure command
| economies being a bad idea.
|
| I think property rights are, if not a necessary part of a
| functional society, at least something that we don't have
| a reasonable alternative for. In other places in this
| thread, I've contrasted situations in which property
| rights make sense with the ridiculous results of trying
| to apply the same principles to abstract ideas. The claim
| that it's not sane or coherent to consider ideas property
| is in no way equivalent to an objection to property
| rights in general
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't
| fulfilling its purpose
|
| I think it very obviously is fulfilling its purpose
| generally speaking. I think this is evident in that fact
| that consumers have access to an extraordinary variety of
| technology, and content. The fact is that the prices for
| access to this are continually falling, the quality of
| products and services is continually improving, and these
| factors are continuously improving quality of life across
| all sectors of society.
|
| The success of this system, and the benefits it provides
| to everybody is perfectly evident everywhere around us.
| You can find instances of this system failing, and
| identify some patterns in those failures, along with
| particular components of the regulatory framework that
| are likely responsible for more bad outcomes than good
| ones. But the system itself has proved its value many
| times over.
|
| Edit: I also think the extent to which hoarding content
| collections has fallen out of favor with consumers is
| rather compelling evidence that the on-demand model is
| more popular. But that's a little besides the point.
| advael wrote:
| Ah, the ol' "This is part of my idea of the status quo,
| so everything that's happened since that could roughly
| pertain to its stated purpose serves as evidence that
| this practice uniquely produced all the outcomes I like"
|
| Classic
| LocalH wrote:
| The original intention of IP law was as you comment. At
| least in terms of copyright, that has been subverted by
| continual extensions. We've gone from 14+14, or 28+14, to
| what, 90 years past the author's death?
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| As a knowledge worker, I think they fact that I have a
| property right over my work product is good for me. I agree
| to assign this right to my employer only because they pay
| me very well to do so. I see others, who don't have some
| kind of similar property interest in their work product,
| get treated a lot worse. In this world where landowners and
| shareholders have so much power, it's nice to be able to
| carve out a nice living using nothing other than what I can
| create with the organ between my ears. I think if it took
| that away, it would cut off one of the only routes to
| income mobility in the 21st century.
| advael wrote:
| As a knowledge worker, I know for a fact that the market
| rates for my work have everything to do with the
| calculated need the company that hired me for has, and
| any intellectual property that may get produced by that
| work is only captured as a matter of course, because
| despite commanding a decent amount of negotiating power
| even for technical fields, it is very difficult to
| negotiate a contract that assigns a license rather than
| full ownership of IP to the company just due to most
| people not reading contracts and it being "standard
| practice" by now. If someone told you that they've
| factored the speculative value of potential future IP
| into your rate somehow, they're bullshitting you
| Avicebron wrote:
| what are you? 12 years old?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| With regard to point 1, the creator should be defined as
| the entity that paid for the creation to come into
| existence, not the engineer / tools that were used to
| create it.
|
| With regard to "Most creative work right now is paid for at
| production". This is clearly false and almost all creative
| work is created speculatively, with the hope that it can be
| made profitable through future sales. All video games, all
| music, all television, all movies.
|
| The only creative works I know of that are paid for at or
| before production are things on Kickstarter or those lucky
| enough to win grants or those with wealthy patrons.
| avz wrote:
| > the creator should be defined as the entity that
| paid...
|
| No. The existing definition of "creator" as the person
| who did the creating is perfectly fine. Various
| supporters, such as those who provided the creator with
| lodging, food, salary or other provisions are themselves
| not the creator.
|
| If you pay an engineer to create a psidget, you haven't
| created anything. The engineer did. You simply exchanged
| your money for the engineer's creation. This is similar
| to how paying a farmer for their crops does not turn you
| into a farmer.
|
| > not the engineer / tools that were used to create
|
| Do not conflate people and tools.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Farmers plant crops to sell speculatively in a market.
| Paying a farmer for the crops makes you a customer. If
| you own some land and decide to grow carrots and then pay
| somebody to plant the seeds and harvest the crop, you are
| absolutely a farmer. (You might do other things, but that
| doesn't make you any less of a farmer)
|
| If you have an idea for a widget, and think there might
| be a market for it, describe what it should do and what
| it should look like, then pay an engineer to work out the
| details and pay them, you are undeniably the creator of
| the widget.
|
| If Netflix decides they want a show that appeals to 10
| year old kids who are into pokemon and video games, then
| pays people to go work up some concepts, then evaluates
| the concepts, and green lights the project, then gathers
| together a team of experts to make it, then there is no
| question Netflix created the show.
|
| People can be used as tools. It's ridiculous to suggest
| anything else.
| LocalH wrote:
| >People can be used as tools. It's ridiculous to suggest
| anything else.
|
| This is a dehumanizing viewpoint.
| advael wrote:
| Yes. Under the current laws, people can be used as tools
| for pay. Also, without intellectual property, people
| could be used as tools in the same way. But under the
| current laws, people can be used as tools to produce
| something that might prevent them from plying the same
| skills in the future, if their practices get captured as
| IP. I do not support laws that tip the balance of power
| further in favor of extracting value from labor, as this
| is already the way the power dynamic naturally goes and
| if we need laws to intervene, it is decidedly in the
| other direction
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The problem with our intellectual property laws are not
| who owns what. (as you suggest in some places). The
| problems are with our implementation. (as you have hinted
| at, but not clearly articulated)
|
| Patents are being granted for trivial things, and the
| courts are to big and too expensive for individuals to be
| able to exercise the rights they already have.
|
| All people should have equal power under the law
| (regardless of wealth), whether its an intellectual
| property dispute, a malpractice lawsuit, or some
| development application.
| advael wrote:
| There are several problems with both the implementation
| and the principles underlying intellectual property laws,
| some of which pertain to who owns what, many of which
| pertain to how ideas can be separated out from each
| other, still yet more pertain to abusable mechanisms for
| the acquisition of intellectual property that subverts
| its ostensible purpose, and a whole category of issues
| that pertain to the special legal powers we seem to be
| willing to grant private corporations (Such as installing
| a rootkit on your personal computer) because we
| prioritize its protection. A few of the big problems do
| have to do with the general cost of litigation, which is
| a separate problem but like most things makes this worse
| advael wrote:
| That's totally nonsensical. Yes, capital pays for labor
| to produce a thing, and then owns the thing. For "things"
| where there's an actual good being produced, this makes
| perfect sense under property rights. We do not need a
| concept of intellectual property for this to be how it
| works, and adding that nonsensical concept wherein
| "ideas" can abstractly themselves be property only serves
| to further empower capital to form monopolies backed by
| the government in this context. The most coherent
| arguments I've heard for intellectual property view the
| value of this unnatural "ideas as property" construct as
| a way for small creators to have some means of subverting
| this dynamic, but it fails to do that.
|
| The idea that creative work is produced "speculatively"
| rather than "at production" is using your ridiculous
| prior stated assumption that the entity that pays for the
| production becomes the "creator" of the work. I've
| already explained why that's insane. This speculative
| model of content production is a business model that's
| emerged in the context of extant laws, not an inevitable
| necessity of production. It is only possible for very
| entrenched entities with a lot of starting capital that
| can afford to take risks in this way, and I don't think
| it's valuable to protect this business model with
| criminal law
| eropple wrote:
| _> It is only possible for very entrenched entities with
| a lot of starting capital that can afford to take risks
| in this way_
|
| Or the author of a book.
| advael wrote:
| Perhaps, if said author is able to produce the whole book
| such that it can be copyrighted, find a way to publish it
| independently, and defend their copyright if a publisher
| likes the idea and gets something similar enough to not
| quite be considered the same thing ghostwritten. This may
| occasionally be feasible, although it does require
| considerable capital or the help of someone else who has
| it. At the end of the day, right now getting a good deal
| out of IP still requires finding someone to work with you
| that you can trust, or having a lot of money to start out
| with
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| >Yes, capital pays for labor to produce a thing, and then
| owns the thing.
|
| Its not the capital that gives companies ownership of its
| creation, its the "will made manifest" by wielding said
| capital.
|
| The company wants the creation to exist, then the
| manipulates the world around it so that the thing comes
| into existence.
|
| You talk of companies as if they are not also people.
| Companies are collections of people.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is one case where patent law has the idea more or
| less right, even if the implementation is nonsense for
| software:
|
| The person who had the _concept_ of the invention is the
| inventor. Not the employer who paid him /her, nor the lab
| assistants who experimented until they got the concept to
| work.
| netcan wrote:
| I totally agree about DMCA and internet-copyright, and the
| analogy to patents here.
|
| That said, IDK if AI-invented patents really pose a challenge.
| It might be a philosophical challenge to the idea of patents,
| but that doesn't necessarily translate into a challenge in
| practice.
|
| IMO logically, if machines cannot be inventors than anything
| invented by machine is arguably trivial. However, I don't think
| this kind of reasoning translates to a legible legal argument.
| mannykannot wrote:
| This looks more like a publicity stunt that anything else.
|
| When the AI can generate a cogent argument for its invention
| being patentable, then I would be prepared to consider its
| claim. Until then, comparisons to the DMCA seem overblown.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Isn't that what a patent lawyer is for?
| mannykannot wrote:
| A patent lawyer helps you make the case in the correct
| form, with all the necessary issues addressed. If the AI
| could work with a patent attorney not already familiar with
| the technical field of the invention, then I would accept
| it as the inventor, but if the attorney has to use her own
| knowledge, or that of third-party experts, to understand
| what the alleged invention is and whether it is novel, then
| no. It is all about whether the AI itself understands its
| supposed invention.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Good this will help stop some patent trolling at least. My god
| the implications of AI just churning out patents with slightly
| different tweaks is mindboggling.
| MeatBro wrote:
| What if I appeal for a patent made by an AI made by myself. Seems
| fair to me.
| ypcx wrote:
| Great, that basically means rendering the patent system defunct,
| going forward, when humans cannot outthink AI anymore.
|
| Sadly, AI will object this in court and win on all counts.
| brian_herman wrote:
| Why not setup a corporation for the AI to file the patents. This
| would have corporate personhood and represent the AI.
| Vespasian wrote:
| As others have said, he is specifically trying to get an AI
| recognized as an Inventor instead of a human (where that is
| required). The invention does not seem to be important to him
| at all.
|
| He is filling similar cases all around the the globe and is
| (mostly) loosing.
|
| It remains unclear whether his motivation is financial or
| ideological or something different all together.
| bdowling wrote:
| In the U.S., the inventor must be a natural person. The owner,
| however, is often a corporation (e.g., when an employee invents
| something in the scope of employment). In that case the owner
| corporation applies for the patent in the inventor's name, but
| it will own all the rights in the patent. The inventor usually
| signs an inventor declaration.
|
| In other countries the inventor can be a corporation. There are
| some cases where this matters (e.g., disputes over inventorship
| or ownership of the invention of an employee), but in most
| cases it probably doesn't matter.
| awinter-py wrote:
| > The third judge, Lord Justice Birss ... also signalled that the
| patent case could have been made simpler if only Mr Thaler "was
| not such an obsessive".
| driverdan wrote:
| By AI he means mathematical equation. When you reword this to
| "Mathematical equation cannot be the inventor of a patent" it
| sounds obvious and stupid. And that's because it is. Of course an
| equation can't patent something.
| edouard-harris wrote:
| Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to
| mathematical equations too, I'm not sure this is a convincing
| reductio. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that a rule like
| this could be consistently applied if, for example, AIs became
| as capable as humans -- or far more so.
| howaboutnope wrote:
| > Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced
| to mathematical equations too
|
| I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the
| phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing
| about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering
| about me.
|
| > It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most
| sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties
| and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little
| scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may
| think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so
| treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its
| reality has been lost.
|
| -- C.S. Lewis
| Goety wrote:
| Human behavior is 100% able to be reduced to mathematical
| equations. Full stop. In aggregate and in day to day
| observation.
| naasking wrote:
| The Bekenstein Bound entails that people can be fully
| captured by a finite amount of information, and therefore a
| person is no more powerful than finite state automoton. Note
| that this is an upper bound, and refining our understanding
| of the the physics involved will only _reduce_ the amount of
| information needed.
|
| The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be
| described by physics.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be
| described by physics.
|
| Or that there is some physics that can't be described by
| computation. It seems vanishingly unlikely, but there is no
| actual proof that everything physical is computable. And
| even if there was, it probably has nothing do do with
| minds.
| Valmar wrote:
| > Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced
| to mathematical equations
|
| There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for this very bold
| claim.
| tired_and_awake wrote:
| > human behavior can ultimately be reduced to mathematical
| equations
|
| Wait what? Source?
| mrbungie wrote:
| I think a lot of people would expect some evidence for your
| first phrase.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| The brain is a biological system of interconnected neurons.
| Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and
| off. The brain is a biological computer. There is no magic,
| no mystical quantum "thing" enabling human intelligence.
| We're not picking up some metaspectral soul transmission
| from an alternate universe. We're advanced binary pattern
| processors, and we're only a handful of orders of magnitude
| more powerful than consumer level hardware.
|
| The algorithm we run on is special, but it's physically
| encoded and self generating, based in our DNA and physical
| development. We're vastly complex but entirely built of
| relatively simple fundamental building blocks.
|
| We are computers, in the abstract sense of Turing machines
| and such concepts.
| u10242 wrote:
| Bye bye free will!
|
| From now on, nothing is my fault any more.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on
| and off.
|
| [citation needed]
| robbedpeter wrote:
| A neuron fires, or it doesn't. The patterns received by
| neurons via synapses are binary. The synapses themselves
| are analog, and the activation can trigger in several
| ways, leading to complex behavior, but the signal each
| individual neuron receives from any and every other
| neuron in the brain is digital.
|
| Where an impulse comes from, when it is sent, the current
| charge state of the receiving neuron, the specific
| neurotransmitters released by the axons, and the
| efficiency of signal transmission at a given point in
| time all play a part in the signal sent along dendritic,
| but at any given point in time a neuron is firing or
| isn't, and that's the only state that matters to the
| other neurons it's connected to.
|
| The biggest difference between biological brains and
| artificial neural networks is the analog nature of
| biological timing compared to the arbitrary cycles of
| software.
|
| Spike timing dependent plasticity networks address some
| of the problem of variable timing and its impact on
| signaling.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-
| dependent_plastic...
|
| At any given moment, you could capture the state of a
| biological brain as a binary number. The model would need
| to account for all sorts of analog mechanisms and a huge,
| biologically messy graph of connections with dozens of
| variations across a handful of neuron types, and the
| length of a synapse and where it physically connects or
| touches other synapses without connecting directly and...
| lots of stuff that's hard to model and even hard to see.
|
| I'm not arguing that every part is digital or even
| equivalent to computers on silicon, simply that the basic
| mechanism of computation is itself digital pattern
| processing. It literally cannot be anything else.
|
| There is no evidence or theory to indicate any other
| plausible method of operation. All the analog stuff can
| be swapped out with an arbitrary bit length
| representation and the functionality is retained. Remove
| the digital assumption and everything breaks. You need
| magic or spirit to make it work, which is ridiculous
| because silicon computers proved that binary computation
| is a perfectly fine way to represent and process data.
| Quantum processing in biological brains is magical
| thinking performed in a desperate attempt to ascribe
| eminence to human cognition, because for some reason
| people don't like the idea that brains do digital
| processing.
|
| We are messy and vastly complex and sophisticated digital
| pattern processors. Which makes evolutionary sense,
| because that's how our predecessors work, all the way
| back to single cell organisms and self replicating DNA
| chemistry.
|
| Signals and patterns in the real world can be represented
| as binary to an arbitrary precision. The Planck length
| dictates the maximum level of precision relevant to our
| universe.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-
| informati...
|
| Human brains achieved a special state of depth and
| breadth of processing, concurrent with physically
| encoded, evolved algorithms in our neural architecture.
| The arrival of biology at human cognition affords us the
| privilege of deep reflection, the apparent subjective
| reality we experience, and the thus far unlimited scope
| of conception such that we can make approximations about
| the size of the universe or the mass of a photon. Or the
| operations of the minds we possess.
|
| We operate in binary - the explanation is sufficient,
| simple, and corresponds to all known evidence. There
| aren't any outstanding questions requiring that premise
| to be questioned.
| porkbrain wrote:
| Parent refers to the behaviour of generating action
| potentials which travel to synapses connecting (mostly)
| axons with dendrites. The continuous (analogue) signal
| processing pre- and post- synapse seems to be a massive
| part of how neurons achieve the computation they do. A
| hypothesis I subscribe to claims that it is cheaper to
| compute locally with molecule gradients and protein
| folding than with spikes. Brains leverage that. The
| specific statement you quoted is to the best of my
| knowledge inaccurate.
|
| I am not an expert, my understanding of neurons is
| largely is based on [0], [1], [2].
|
| [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-
| design
|
| [1]: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/
| W08-spru...
|
| [2]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-
| connections-cortic...
| [deleted]
| enchiridion wrote:
| And we were clocks a few centuries ago. I wonder if there
| is a name for the bias of thinking our modern
| abstractions are the right ones.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| You can't abstract further than bits. 0's and 1's all the
| way down!
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't understand the distinction you're making in this
| particular case. Clockwork and circuits have very similar
| abilities.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Some of the literature in neuroscience and ai perpetuate
| this meme, going something like "medieval people thought
| their minds worked like catapults, Renaissance people
| thought of clockwork, early industrial age people thought
| it was like steam engines, and now in the digital age we
| think it's like computers, oh aren't purple so silly."
|
| It's a superficial and unfounded observation that tries
| to frame neural computation as a bias or conceit of
| modern culture. Not how science works, and the argument
| is condescending as hell.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It can be an interesting thing to look at, much like the
| idea of remote harassment with an air loom.
|
| But I agree that it's a really shallow way to dismiss
| arguments. In this case, it's basically just saying that
| a brain is deterministic and made out of parts. Clockwork
| and steam engines and circuits all work fine. I can't
| comment on the catapult without more elaboration.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| As far as catapults go, or really the whole premise, I
| don't think it was ever considered in a serious way,
| except to propagate through various papers and books
| because it sounds clever. It's a bad meme.
| enchiridion wrote:
| I'd say it's anything but shallow. What I'm getting at is
| that there may be things completely beyond our current
| understanding related to consciousness. As in, multiple
| paradigm shifts away.
|
| Without getting into the weeds too much, I just find the
| certainty of the systems line of thinking a little
| unfounded.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Universal Turing Machines and number theory and formal
| logic aren't going away - the universe runs on math, and
| our brains operate in binary. Those statements are ground
| truth - there's no room for breaking things down further.
|
| Consciousness is an algorithm performed by a computer
| with messy biological parts, some of which are analog,
| which may have serious implications for the level of
| strictly digital computer power you need to successfully
| implement the algorithm in silicon. The same applies to
| intelligence, and it's an open question as to what
| exactly the relationship between subjective experience
| and intelligence is.
|
| You are a brain in a bone vat experiencing a subjective
| construct produced by a biological computer processing
| binary states consisting of internal feedback and sensory
| streams made entirely of patterns distinguished at any
| moment in time by the presence or absence of electrical
| impulses. Each neuron can be receiving a pattern of up to
| ten thousand individual bits, and whether the neuron
| fires or not depends on the current state and precise
| pattern of inputs.
|
| Everything you experience, think, or do, is determined by
| those electrical patterns.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Well certainly, in some sense they are fundamental to the
| universe. But in this situation it's a bit like saying
| the photon isn't going away. Sure, but the strong link to
| consciousness isn't there.
|
| However, the universe doesn't run on math, it runs on
| itself. Math is the best way we have to describe it at
| the moment. It used to be that divination was the best
| method. Why are you so certain math in it's recognizable
| form today will be the method used to describe the
| universe in 100k years?
|
| Our brains certainly do not run on binary. I think you
| might be confusing the information content, represented
| in bits, with the actual implementation. At the very
| least dendrites take in and mix signals of various
| strengths. The threshold for triggering and strength of
| the action potential are dependent on many chemicals
| signals. And that's even a dated understanding which gave
| rise to the ideas of artificial neural networks. I'm sure
| the current understanding is much more complex and
| nuanced.
|
| You brush off the analog parts as an implementation
| detail, when it could have very real implications for the
| computability of consciousness. The thing is, we don't
| know.
|
| But even all that is besides the point. The main point
| is, we don't have the slightest idea how consciousness
| works. To the point that no one can even figure out how
| to ask the right questions about it.
|
| In the face of such great uncertainty, it is anti-
| scientific to state with such conviction that you have
| the correct model. It's fine to present it as a
| hypothesis, but the certainty is unfounded.
| frabcus wrote:
| The earliest place I've seen this is the introduction to
| Julian Jaynes "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
| of the Bicameral Mind"
|
| https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/books/ooc/en/intro
| duc...
|
| The way he does it is quite compelling - we do make
| metaphors of the mind to current tech. This was written
| well before current computer neural networks, and gives a
| good account of the sound version of this argument.
| edouard-harris wrote:
| You're right. I'll edit the parent to soften the assertion,
| though I do consider it to be virtually certain.
|
| In terms of evidence: the simplest argument is probably
| that humans appear to consistently obey the laws of
| physics, and the laws of physics appear to be mathematical.
| ars wrote:
| Something can be mathematical and also not computable.
| canjobear wrote:
| Given sufficiently powerful computers, human behavior could
| be simulated. The action of the computer would be
| describable as a (possibly enormously long and complicated)
| equation. I don't see how you can disagree with this unless
| you think there is something metaphysically inexplicable
| about human behavior.
| sjy wrote:
| You can accept that the brain is governed by physical
| laws, without conceding that the brain can be simulated.
| Emulation on the atomic level may not be computationally
| feasible. The emergence of human behaviour from a less
| detailed simulation is not guaranteed. These
| possibilities are discussed under the heading "Scale
| separation" in the roadmap to whole brain emulation
| published by the Future of Humanity Institute [1].
|
| > At first it may appear unlikely that a complex system
| with many degrees of freedom like the brain could be
| modelled with the right causal dynamics, but without
| taking into account the smallest parts ... However, state
| variables of complex systems can be quantitatively
| predicted when there is 'scale separation': when
| different aspects of the system exist on sufficiently
| (orders of magnitude) different scales (of size, energy,
| time etc), they can become uncoupled ... [an] example is
| the scale separation between electric currents and logic
| operations in a computer ...
|
| > When there is no scale separation (such as in fluid
| turbulence) macroscale predictions become impossible
| without simulating the entire microscale. An important
| issue to be determined is whether such a cut-off exists
| in the case of the human brain ... if it could be
| demonstrated that there is no such scale, it would
| demonstrate the infeasibility of whole brain emulation.
|
| The FHI is assuming scale invariance in order to test it
| experimentally. We shouldn't assume it for the purpose of
| analysing the roles played by humans and AI under IP
| legislation.
|
| [1]: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-
| report.pdf
| reverend_gonzo wrote:
| Sure, and those sufficiently powerful computers don't
| exist yet.
| canjobear wrote:
| The actual existence of the actual machine is irrelevant
| for the claim that human behavior can be reduced to an
| equation. What is it about human behavior that you think
| could not be simulated by a machine?
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Basically this line of argument boils down to assuming
| something about something we don't and may never have.
|
| Until we have this technology should we adjust laws for
| hypotheticals? No.
| canjobear wrote:
| Put another way: the claim that humans cannot be modeled
| as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be
| modeled using physics. Do you want to defend that?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations
| equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using
| physics_
|
| We don't have a complete theory of physics. We don't have
| any viable models of human thought. This is a non
| sequitur.
| canjobear wrote:
| We do have a theory of physics which is likely to be able
| to cover all the phenomena of biology[1], but that is
| beside the point. If you think that human behavior cannot
| be reduced to equations, then you think it cannot be
| predicted mathematically. I can only interpret this as a
| claim that there is something about human behavior which
| is supernatural.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you think that human behavior cannot be reduced to
| equations, then you think it cannot be predicted
| mathematically. I can only interpret this as a claim that
| there is something about human behavior which is
| supernatural._
|
| You've reduced the question of whether our universe is
| deterministic, something the greatest minds in physics
| have debated for a century and continue to debate, to a
| sound bite. That's disingenuous. There may be phenomena
| we cannot accurately model and predict for fundamental
| reasons that have nothing to do with the supernatural.
|
| We are so far from scientifically understanding
| consciousness that we don't even have an agreed-upon
| empirical definition for it, let alone a way to measure
| it. That gap in understanding undermines any claim that
| it can be modelled this way or that.
| canjobear wrote:
| Determinism is irrelevant. You can use stochastic
| equations to simulate human behavior if there are quantum
| effects involved.
|
| Consciousness is more interesting, and it boils down to
| the claim that there is something metaphysically and
| unverifiably (from the outside) special about humans.
| That sounds supernatural to me.
| blix wrote:
| It sounds to me that you are arguing that consciousness
| fundementally doesn't exist; what we think of
| consciousness is an emergent property of fundementally
| determinable physical rules.
|
| If this is the case why are you arguing on HN? Is it
| possible for you to leave the discussion? Is talking to
| you the same as dropping a ball and watching gravity pull
| it downwards?
|
| I'm a little skeptical of your stochastic model of
| humanity as well. Statistical mechanics works because
| oxygen molecules don't go off and start religions and
| convince other oxygen molecules to behave radically
| differently for thousands of years (or at least we
| haven't ever seen it). In fact our stoachstic physical
| models, classical, semi-classical and quantum, kinda
| specifically preclude this. How would you design an
| equation to capture this real phenomenon in humans?
| Jensson wrote:
| > You can use stochastic equations to simulate human
| behavior if there are quantum effects involved.
|
| No you cannot, quantum effects are way more complex than
| just random chance effects. The quantum waves are
| particles in their own rights that flows and interacts
| with each other and itself, if you treat it as just a
| stochastic variable you don't get quantum effects.
| canjobear wrote:
| You just use the Born rule to get your probabilities from
| the wave function...
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| This really makes me think. Unknowable is often mistaken
| as supernatural. Could human behavior possibly be
| physically unknowable? There are potential unknowables:
| Non-observable universe, destructed past information,
| progressively fundamental particles.
|
| Even with indestructible information, combined with
| locality at the big-bang, combined with a perfect
| fundamental physics, is there enough time/energy to
| compute that? Perhaps this is grasping at straws.
| tremon wrote:
| No, what people are saying is that humans cannot be
| reduced to your abstract model. Your model is a
| simplification, and to insist that reality matches the
| model is a very myopic worldview.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I'm not claiming anything with regards to math model
| people.
|
| With regards to the law, you're saying, because we assume
| that one day we should have a complete simulation of
| humans, or at least a model, therefore, we should update
| our laws NOW, to prepare for this?
|
| A story of premature optimisation if I ever heard one.
| canjobear wrote:
| The claim was that it's obvious that an AI can't patent
| something because the AI is an "equation." I'm claiming
| that if you want to establish a meaningful difference
| between humans an AIs, which would be useful legally, it
| can't be that one is an "equation" and the other is not,
| because "an equation" could equally well describe human
| behavior. You'd have to search for the distinction
| elsewhere.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| It is legally useful since it fits with our current
| understanding. When this changes, the laws will change.
| Your scenario is completely hypothetical at this point
| and also kinda extrapolated from things we know now.
| Jensson wrote:
| Modelling quantum physics interactions is NP-hard, you
| can't do that using regular computers even if you make
| them as big as the universe.
|
| It is possible you can make a good simulation of human
| thought without all of that, but we can't be certain.
| lordlic wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism
|
| It's a very common worldview among the tech set.
|
| Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally
| reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like,
| pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to
| provide their own extraordinary evidence for why
| consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to
| provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff
| that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any
| thought) already knows about.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Downvoted because the commenter asked for evidence, and
| you just provided a definition. The statement that it's
| "obviously true" is not evidence, or even an argument. If
| I said it's "obviously _not_ true ", would you consider
| yourself refuted? Probably not.
| tremon wrote:
| You're merely repeating the GP's assertion, and
| completely ignoring the parent's request for
| corroborating evidence. What you hold as self-evident is
| still just your anecdata, and cannot be extrapolated to
| "the tech set", unless the tech set includes only you.
| lordlic wrote:
| I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it
| _is_ , your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them
| the search term to read more if they're interested.
| What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's
| the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating
| evidence" to present so much as there are logical
| arguments that you need to read up on yourself.
| beckman466 wrote:
| wow who knew that sand (silicon) could potentially invent new
| things? /sarcasm
|
| but on a serious note, why do people say things like "humans are
| nothing but complicated biological machines"?
|
| i mean, why do you really want to replicate the human brain?
|
| i don't get it. is it alienation, loneliness? projecting your
| hope for connection and understanding onto something you program?
| is it to stay in control and avoid disappointment?
|
| today too many vital feedback loops of science and technology are
| withheld from the commons by the propertied class. imagine what
| we could do if all science was mapped, further developed and
| universally shared in the open; no longer monopolized behind
| corporate walls. that's something that excites me a lot. not
| black box 'AI' owned by Musk, Zuck, Brin, Page, Cook or whomever.
| seriously, science fiction about this whole AI thing is
| unrealistic and dystopian.
|
| when we start to realize most science and technology was publicly
| funded, will we seriously consider ditching the criminalization
| of knowledge sharing (intellectual property laws)?
|
| _"Many of the problems being faced today by the [US] are due to
| the fact that US taxpayer...do not realize that corporations are
| making money from innovation that has been supported by their
| taxes." That they are not aware of the benefits to competition
| seems to be a triumph of free-market ideology over good sense.
|
| How many Americans are aware that Google's basic algorithm was
| developed with a National Science Foundation grant?"_ [1]
|
| do we really want to destroy the world so we can have a 'Free
| Guy' Ryan Reynolds -like fake AI friend?
|
| _" 90% of machine learning is burning down a forest so that you
| can train a computer to do phrenology"_ [2]
|
| -- @cooljqln
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c...
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/cooljqln/status/1441577367416098820
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I assume everyone is aware that copyright != patent. They're
| different. DMCA applies only to copyright. But you knew that.
|
| Anyhow:
|
| It's impossible to talk about patent reform without _first_
| separating software from everything else. Otherwise, you 're
| trying to make standards that apply equally to bankruptcy and
| stand-your-ground laws. They're just different.
|
| If Congress and/or the courts made software not patentable once
| and for all, then the patent system would look completely
| different. Most HN readers would stop thinking about patents
| altogether and move on to copyright.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Patents are by definition anti-science and anti-reality, it's a
| blight on our society.
|
| Why did anyone, anywhere, at any point in time, believe that it
| was reasonable to criminalize programmers for writing the correct
| solution to a problem?
|
| Every single lawyer that has ever defended software patents
| should be immediately disbarred, and forbidden from ever
| practicing law again.
| [deleted]
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| AI gonna disagree with this one
| milesward wrote:
| Mechanical Turk an ai-made patent launderer, how hard is that?
| adamgluck wrote:
| "Measure of a man" vibes
| wil421 wrote:
| AI doesn't exist. In the past 5-10 years AI has been rewritten to
| AGI. AI now means math models. Just look at the movie AI and
| others like it. I guess when you become a buzzword it's time to
| change the meaning. Thankfully the UK and US court system are
| sane.
|
| When "AI" says no I don't want to invent a patent I want to play
| music (or whatever else it may desire) I'll believe it exists.
|
| Machine learning, deep learning, neural network, and gradient
| decent are better terms but I'm not an expert.
| beervirus wrote:
| The UK court of appeal.
| latortuga wrote:
| I wonder how this will dovetail with something like GitHub
| copilot. Obviously there will have to be a line somewhere. AI
| wrote 10% of the code in this system => patent allowed. AI wrote
| 90% => no patent. But where is the line?
| worrycue wrote:
| I believe a patent would be allowed even if AI wrote 100% of
| the code as long as, listed in the patent, the owner is a human
| or a corporation and the inventor is human.
| marcodiego wrote:
| What if my AI invents something and then someone else patents it?
| Can I use the invention from my AI as prior art?
| tyre wrote:
| Remove "AI" and it makes sense.
|
| If you invent something and someone else patents it, you show
| prior art to invalidate the patent.
|
| Whether you used software or a lathe or a lawnmower or excel to
| make the thing doesn't matter.
| superjan wrote:
| It is only prior art if it is made public. If you invent
| something and keep it secret someone else can still patent
| it.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| In US we've moved from first to invent to first to file. This
| makes prior art a lot less relevant.
| jefftk wrote:
| First to file means that, as someone who invented earlier
| but did not file, you aren't going to be able to get that
| the patent reassigned to you. But you can still use your
| prior art to get the patent invalidated.
|
| (Not a lawyer)
| bdowling wrote:
| > ...as someone who invented earlier but did not file,
| you aren't going to be able to get that the patent
| reassigned to you.
|
| There's an exception: When a second applicant disclosed
| the invention publicly both prior to the first
| application and less than one year prior to the second
| application.
|
| Another note: Prior art needs to be publicly available.
| So, a first inventor's private notes can't invalidate a
| second inventor's patent. In the old first-to-invent
| system, however, the private notes of a first inventor
| could allow the first inventor to get the patent ahead of
| a second inventor who filed first.
| ghaff wrote:
| IANAL but presumably any prior art involving a computer or
| other type of machinery you created is effectively your prior
| art. The fact there were tools evolved wouldn't generally
| matter.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Depends, AI you are running or AI you are selling? I don't see
| how AI would make much difference compared to let's say
| simulation software for some chemical process or anything at
| all.
|
| If you were running it and someone stole the results prior art
| would likely be yours. If you allowed someone to run it with
| their own inputs it would likely be theirs.
| bdowling wrote:
| The applicant recorded his AI as the inventor for some reason
| (*). Had the applicant recorded himself as the inventor having
| used the AI as a tool to invent, then the application probably
| would have been allowed.
|
| Using a mechanical process to search a large possibility space to
| find a patentable subspace is not new. For example, testing
| chemical compounds to find a mixture with optimal properties or
| testing drug dosages to find the most effective treatment is
| common. The resulting narrow range of mixtures or dosages is
| patentable so long as it is new (not done before), non-obvious
| (inventive), useful, etc. Also, if I hire other people to do the
| lab work at my direction, then I am still the inventor, not the
| lab technicians. Similarly, AI is just another tool.
|
| Edit: (*) After looking into this more, the applicant here is on
| a crusade to have an AI recognized as an inventor.
| https://artificialinventor.com/patent-applications/. That web
| site contains nonsense like the following:
|
| > _Arguably, DABUS may be considered "sentient" in that any
| chain-based concept launches a series of memories (i.e., affect
| chains) that sometimes terminate in critical recollections,
| thereby launching a tide of artificial molecules. It is these
| associated memory sequences, and the accompanying simulated
| neurotransmitter rush, that are considered equivalent to
| subjective feelings in humans (i.e., sentience). In this way,
| DABUS has an emotional appreciation for what it conceives._
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Maybe they realised how many forms they'd have to update and
| they gave up.
|
| "Family name - GPT, ethnicity - X86/ARM/NVidia?, Birth date -
| [not an adult?], gender... fuck that. Joe, tell them no, I'm
| not doing this shit!"
| judge2020 wrote:
| I wonder if he got consent from this sentient AI on forcing it
| to generate patents.
| cube00 wrote:
| Maybe he allowed it to choose between the life of a patent
| troll or passing the butter.
| slim wrote:
| That text was generated by AI too
| andi999 wrote:
| Does just beiing sentient give you rights by law?
| jobigoud wrote:
| Not in most jurisdictions. Most animals are sentient and
| can't be inventors on a patent.
| blueprint wrote:
| then that's not a real AI
| Andrex wrote:
| I see where this is going.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv_Y-norYPU
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I had the same initial reaction, but it makes sense for the
| laws to be written based on current reality and not some
| hypothetical future.
|
| AIs are not conscious (now), nor do they elicit anything
| resembling consciousness.
|
| If that changes, the law can (should) change with it.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would even extend this to other animals. If we reach a
| point where they can communicate and work in legal system
| like humans they should also gain authorship rights.
|
| Now what standards and how to apply them is complicated
| question. Specially with software. Which can be written to
| make complex actions. But still not have consciousness
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