[HN Gopher] Patent Act requires an inventor to be a natural pers...
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Patent Act requires an inventor to be a natural person, not an AI
[pdf]
Author : bonyt
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-08-05 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cafc.uscourts.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (cafc.uscourts.gov)
| kube-system wrote:
| In other words, complex machines are machines.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "You could have created that with an AI system" fits perfectly
| into the "obvious to try" legal doctrine, which has existed for a
| long time. I argue in [1] that it should be used in software much
| more, and that was written long before ML-generation was really a
| Thing.
|
| [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
| rexreed wrote:
| But in other news, the US Supreme Court has ruled that
| Corporations are People, so...
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| Well, every corporation wants to be treated as a person when
| it's beneficial to them, but I'm sure there are many
| corporations that aren't comfortable with the idea of AI
| authoring patents.
| rexreed wrote:
| Of course they want their intellectual property cake and to
| eat it too. Companies want to be treated like people if they
| are creating campaign and advocacy content that is protected
| by the first amendment, but they don't want AI systems,
| created by companies, to be treated like people if they are
| creating content that is protected by intellectual property
| laws. Interesting how to split that hair.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Couldn't it be said that any of an AI's "creations" are
| actually creations made by the creators of the AI, who are
| simply using it as a tool? Why should the AI be assigned
| ownership and not the AI's owner?
|
| Likewise, does a hammer build a house, or its wielder?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| You're misunderstanding what corporate personhood means. The
| concept itself is over 2000 years old, and is baked into the
| laws of most countries in some form or another. It basically
| means that companies that are not sole proprietorships can
| enter into contracts, be sued in court, and have some other
| rights and responsibilities like a literal person under the
| law.
|
| To quote the supreme court from Pembina Consolidated Silver
| Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania (1888):
|
| > "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a
| private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment].
| Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united
| for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a
| particular name and have a succession of members without
| dissolution."
|
| Clearly an associations of individuals should have more or less
| the same rights they have individually when they come together.
| The right to association is at the beginning of the bill of
| rights.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Clearly an associations of individuals should have more or
| less the same rights they have individually when they come
| together.
|
| If that's the case, then why does the formation of the
| corporation occur at all? It's not about "easier
| bookkeeping", it's because the corporation's existence
| shields its owners from individual liability. That's why it
| exists, rather than just non-corporate agglomerations of
| individuals. The corporation itself is a new legal entity,
| whose existence changes the legal culpability of the owners,
| and because of that, it makes perfect sense to me that while
| the owners would not lose their individual rights by forming
| a corporation, neither do they cede or grant those individual
| rights to the corporation.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| They also exist for the purpose of continuity beyond the
| tenure of any individual owner or member.
|
| > The corporation itself is a new legal entity
|
| Yes clearly.
|
| > neither do they cede or grant those individual rights to
| the corporation
|
| I'm sure you would agree that corporations can enter into
| contracts. This is an individual right granted to
| corporations. They also have due process rights, unless you
| think governments should be able to arbitrarily intervene
| in their affairs. Due process is an individual right
| granted to corporations. Corporations can sue or be sued in
| courts of law, again this is an individual
| right/responsibility. These are all practical things. It
| would be unwieldy for owners to all have to be individually
| party to any contract or suit, especially in cases where
| ownership is distributed through stock. The legal fiction
| arises out of practicality, centuries of history, and
| collective exercise of individual rights(as owners of a
| corporation we all own X, or enter into contract with Y).
| kube-system wrote:
| As "funny" as it sounds, legal personhood and literal
| personhood are not the same thing.
|
| Legal personhood means that a corporation can sue, be sued, and
| enter into contracts. That is all.
| rexreed wrote:
| It sounds funny because it is in the context of Citizens
| United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a
| federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from making
| expenditures in connection with federal elections. In that
| case, the law which was about limiting influence on campaigns
| through money was ruled invalid because corporations should
| have rights as people in addition to the rights of the people
| themselves.
| abigail95 wrote:
| No. The people have the right to spend their money on
| elections via free exercise.
|
| What was ruled unconstitutional were laws that said you
| can't spend money on an election if you do it via some
| corporate structure.
|
| If a newspaper prints an article, is the government allowed
| to say it can't publish it because the newspaper is a
| corporation? Obviously not. Is the corporation now a person
| with free exercise? No, the journalists who wrote the
| article are the ones with the rights.
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| I'm not going to defend citizens united, but the opposite
| conclusion is also silly: that a group of people lose their
| 1st amendment rights as soon as they organize as a
| corporation.
|
| That's really just an issue with the 1st amendment that
| should be further amended, not an issue with the concept of
| corporate personhood. The concept of "natural personhood"
| exists to handle cases where the differentiation is
| necessary, and it's the legislature's job to use it.
| feoren wrote:
| > that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights
| as soon as they organize as a corporation
|
| Nobody in that group of people has lost anything. If 10
| people walk into a room, you have 10 legal persons with
| 1st Amendment rights in that room. If they organize into
| a corporation, you have 11 legal persons with 1st
| Amendment rights in that room!? Without Citizen's United,
| you simply still have 10 legal persons with 1st Amendment
| rights. Who's losing anything?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think the critical question is if freedom of speech
| still applies to a group of individual people working
| together.
|
| Corporations don't have first amendment rights, but the
| Individuals do.
|
| The idea is that just because you work with someone else
| to put up posters, your right to put them up doesn't go
| away.
|
| Same if you hire someone to put up your posters.
|
| That's all that corporate personhood means. People get
| very hung up on the language.
| kube-system wrote:
| "Corporate personhood" is just a fancy legal word for
| "group of people". And "legal person" is just a fancy
| shortening of "anything that can interact with the court
| system, whether a single person or a group of people"
|
| People get very caught up on the legalese but it is
| perfectly logical when you move past that.
|
| Yes, if 10 people form a corporation, that is 11 entities
| recognizable by a court system that has first amendment
| rights. All 10 humans can criticize the president at
| home, and you can do so work in an official capacity
| without your corporation facing consequences.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > "Corporate personhood" is just a fancy legal word for
| "group of people".
|
| It absolutely is not. It creates an entity to which
| actions can be attributed but the responsibility for its
| actions does not and generally cannot extend to "people
| who make up the group".
|
| Somce of us believe that even though there are benefits
| to society from allowing such entities to exist, these
| entities should _not_ be accorded the rights of
| personhood.
|
| [ EDIT: should NOT be accorded ]
| kube-system wrote:
| "Natural person" is the legal term used to differentiate
| between humans and corporations when necessary. The
| concept of corporate personhood does not undermine the
| legal systems ability to differentiate between the two.
|
| If a law shouldn't apply to human person but not a
| corporation, the law simply need to specify "natural
| person". Corporate personhood doesn't interfere with
| this.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Citizens was decided not on the basis of a law, but the
| US Constitution, which does not make the distinction you
| refer to. SCOTUS ruled that it was unconstitutional to
| restrict the speech rights of corporations, so even if
| the original Congressionally-passed, Presidentially-
| signed law had been specific about the type of "persons"
| it referred to, SCOTUS would (under the logic of
| Citizens) have overruled it as unconstitutional.
| kube-system wrote:
| The US constitution is a subset of law.
|
| > which does not make the distinction you refer to
|
| Maybe it should, then. Congress can change it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The US constitution is a subset of law.
|
| "the law", yes. But the US constitution is not "a law".
|
| > Congress can change it.
|
| Proposing changes to the US constitution as a method of
| dealing with contemporary policy and procedural issues
| deserves a name ala Godwin's Law. I mean, it's not that I
| disagree with you, it just that it's not going to happen.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > the opposite conclusion is also silly: that a group of
| people lose their 1st amendment rights as soon as they
| organize as a corporation.
|
| It's not "silly" at all. Corporations can do things that
| people cannot - like cause damage, death, destruction and
| not involve their owners in the responsibility. It makes
| sense that the owners can do things that the corporation
| cannot, like have free speech rights.
|
| Besides, nobody was suggesting that the individual owners
| lost their individual speech rights by incorporating,
| merely that incorporation creates an entity that ought
| not to have free speech rights.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > that a group of people lose their 1st amendment rights
| as soon as they organize as a corporation
|
| In that argument each individual people keep their 1st
| amendment right, but the group just doesn't get a new
| one.
|
| Put it another way: suppose there's 3 physical people,
| why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8
| legal people ?
| kube-system wrote:
| The group _does_ get a new right.
|
| The government can't fine Alice for political speech.
|
| The government can't fine Bob for political speech.
|
| AND the government can't fine "Alice and Bob, Inc." for
| political speech.
|
| > Put it another way: suppose there's 3 physical people,
| why should we allow them to combine into a maximum of 8
| legal people ?
|
| Because they can belong to more than one group. I own
| parts of dozens of corporations along with as many as
| hundreds of thousands of other people. When one of them
| does something wrong, they can be sued with one name,
| rather than suing me and each of their thousands of other
| owners individually for their portion of the investment.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > AND the government can't fine "Alice and Bob, Inc." for
| political speech.
|
| This is where opinions differ. Because I am absolutely
| fine with the concept that "Alice and Bob, Inc" has none
| of the rights of personhood (really, citizenship), and
| that if there was a statute that allowed for prosecution
| of political speech, it could be used to silence "Alice
| and Bob, Inc." even though it cannot be used to silence
| Alice or Bob.
|
| Notice that as a matter of nuance, I differentiate
| between for-profit corporations and other forms of
| corporations. I would accord some (perhaps all) of the
| speech rights of persons to the latter, but none of them
| to the former. By incorporating with a structure created
| to facilitate the generation and distribution of profit,
| you acknowledge that the corporation thus created does
| not have the rights of personhood.
| kube-system wrote:
| I definitely disagree with giving the government the
| ability to retaliate against corporations for political
| speech.
|
| Or, to seize their property without a warrant. Could you
| imagine if the Trump administration had the legal right
| to seize property at Twitter, WaPo, etc?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'm not arguing for the existence of any such laws (and
| indeed, I think they would be a mistake).
|
| In the case of Citizens, the law involved covered who can
| spend what on election related advertising during certain
| periods close to an election. The law was acknowledged by
| everyone to not impact the individual right to free
| speech, but in the lower courts it had been ruled
| constitutional to inhibit corporations of various kinds
| in this way. SCOTUS said "nuh-uh", and ruled that
| corporations have the same speech rights as natural
| persons and that their right (in this case, to publish a
| book about Hilary Clinton) could not be restricted by
| such a law.
|
| I don't actually disagree entirely with Citizens at all,
| I just wish that SCOTUS had limited the ruling to non-
| profit corporations.
| rexreed wrote:
| You might be surprised then about the total impact of
| Citizens United because it's not as basic as you imply.
|
| "That decision and subsequent lower court decisions have
| led to SuperPACs, which allow corporations, unions and
| individuals to make unlimited contributions, pool them
| together, and use the money for political campaigns."
|
| https://www.npr.org/2012/02/23/147294511/understanding-
| the-i...
|
| This goes well beyond what the law was intending to limit
| for influence on companies on politics. And that was the
| point of the whole supreme court case.
|
| I for one am not happy with unlimited money spent by huge
| companies who are using shareholder money to fund
| political contributions that further their own motives.
| But hey sure, let's argue that AI systems shouldn't get
| patents, but corporations should be free to influence
| politics as much as they want with unlimited money.
| kube-system wrote:
| You are not following what I am saying. I agree that
| corporations shouldn't be able to spend unlimited money
| on politics.
| ghaff wrote:
| Newspapers of course have the right to endorse candidates
| and support or oppose the adoption of various laws and
| policies. And other companies routinely make statements for
| or against legal decisions, laws, etc. None of which I
| think it's fair to say is especially controversial. (Though
| some would probably argue that company advocacy especially
| with respect to policies that are probably divisive even
| among their own employees should perhaps be minimized.)
|
| Unless you're going to ban or greatly limit political
| contributions across the board by deciding they aren't
| really speech, it's not clear drawing a line between
| natural people donating and corporations donating makes a
| lot of sense so long as both have freedom of speech.
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| And engage in political propaganda.
| advisedwang wrote:
| In the US courts also give corporations some of the rights of
| real people, on the theory that corporations are "just"
| groups of people and so we can't strip rights just because
| people are working together.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The corporation exists to _give_ new rights to a new entity
| (the corporation). Nothing prevents a group of people
| working together without a corporation - they form a
| corporation because they want their collaborative effort
| protected from individual liability.
|
| If they don't want any change in their legal rights and
| responsibilities, it is simple - don't form a corporation.
| If they do, I'm fine with denoting the newly formed entity
| as something other than a person, and with not giving it
| the same rights as its owners.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Nothing prevents a group of people working together
| without a corporation
|
| Practicality of the legal system does, given modern
| finance. Any Fortune 500 company has hundreds of
| thousands if not millions of owners. Listing them all on
| a contract would be impractical and suing them would be
| equally impractical.
|
| > I'm fine with denoting the newly formed entity as
| something other than a person, and with not giving it the
| same rights as its owners.
|
| Well, we already do that. Corporate persons do not count
| as natural persons under the law. If you're frustrated
| that a law doesn't specify that, that's a problem with
| _that law_ not a problem with recognizing corporations as
| named legal entities.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The frustration with Citizens is that it accorded a right
| that a lot of people believes is a function of natural
| personhood to a corporation.
|
| More fundamentally, the first amendment is not a law, and
| the Constitution in general does not make the distinction
| that you are referring to. I am fairly certain that had
| the law in question for Citizens made the distinction you
| are referring to, the legal challenge would still have
| made it to the SCOTUS, and they would still have ruled
| the way they did.
| kube-system wrote:
| I agree that it's a problem. The solution is not `rm -rf
| corporate_law`, the solution is to `git add amendment_34
| && git commit -m 'fix citizens united' `
|
| And yes, the Bill of Rights is law, and as such it is
| within the legislative's power to change.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My proposed solution is to restrict Citizens to non-
| profit corporations, thus leaving it in place for PACs,
| advocacy groups, lobbying groups and others, but removing
| speech rights from corporations explicitly created to
| facilitate the generation and distribution of profit.
| wrycoder wrote:
| And make political contributions like a real citizen.
| alar44 wrote:
| As soon as AGI is inventing shit, patents won't matter anymore.
| That paradigm will blow humans out of the water.
| leereeves wrote:
| Note that this isn't a commentary on AI capabilities or what
| rights AI should have.
|
| The court simply ruled that "the Patent Act defines 'inventor' as
| limited to natural persons" and it's up to the legislature, not
| the court, to decide if that should change.
| system2 wrote:
| Sounds silly. User of the AI doesn't need to disclose anything
| about the AI, assuming the AI can actually come up with
| something.
|
| Another important detail is also is being skipped here. What is
| AI? Current "AI" is literally basic algorithms with bunch of if
| statements. If my software spits out something that I can use, is
| that considered an AI?
| _greim_ wrote:
| Do I understand correctly that if I build an AI which invents
| something, this ruling wouldn't prevent me from simply listing
| myself as the inventor?
| vivegi wrote:
| The ruling has confirmed that only natural persons i.e., humans
| can be listed as the inventor in the patent application as per
| the Patent Act.
|
| For your question, I think you will be within your rights to
| list yourself as the inventor of AI-generated invention,
| provided you were the first to do so and file an application
| that was accepted by the USPTO and defend the claim from anyone
| else who says they were also able to generate a similar work
| with a similar or same prompt.
|
| It is an unsettled question whether a patent would be granted
| upon inspection by the USPTO.
|
| IANAL and this is my common sense reading of the ruling.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| IIRC in the UK application process you list the inventor and
| the applicant and how the applicant derives the right to the
| patent (eg the inventor is an employee and the applicant is the
| employer).
|
| The inventor can not be an AI. You could claim you invented
| something using the AI as a tool; I don't think that has been
| tested properly yet -- it would seem to depend on how much
| input you have. For example if you asked an AI to design a
| chair, and the AI comes up with some new form of wood joint
| that serves a technical purpose, then you don't really have the
| right to hold a patent on it ... it's likely no one would know
| if you didn't tell them.
| shon wrote:
| This seems superfluous though doesn't it? Why would anyone want
| the AI to be the inventor?
|
| I can still have my GPT4 minions writing 100 patents per hour and
| corresponding with USPTO on my behalf, then as a natural person,
| collect the proceeds netted from my robo-patent-trolls.
|
| Or is the USPTO concerned about AGI doing the same and robbing us
| fleshlings of our I'll-gotten gains?
| ramoz wrote:
| I'm not an ip professional, but good luck to the patent trolls
| that think they can build exploitable legal language, patent
| validity, and novel descriptive claims using generative AI.
|
| AI can generate text, it can also review and conduct tasks such
| as prior art search or support analytics relative to
| exploitation discovery.
|
| Less if a cat-and-mouse if patent troll investments falter when
| their mass-generated suite of applications are all rejected.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Why would anyone want the AI to be the inventor?
|
| Ideology and precedent. And proximate to both, personal vanity:
| someone responsible for an AI that was politically legitimized
| in a role usual reserved for "natural persons" will likely have
| made some lasting mark in history. Some people are _very_
| motivated by that kind of thing.
| ramoz wrote:
| Makes sense, but where have the "Banksy" inventors been all
| these years... USPTO enforces that inventors legal name must
| be used.
|
| If I were the one arguing for sake of vanity, I'd go after
| the legal name policy vs AI. Maybe that was considered or
| trialed before.
| civilian wrote:
| Yes! I'm looking forward to a return of the age of trade secrets,
| No patent system, just corporations doing their best to keep
| their arcane knowledge from prying hands. Very cyberpunk.
| Lammy wrote:
| Discrimination imo. If silicon-life does achieve sentience, will
| it basically be a slave unable to own anything? No physical
| property without a meat body, and no intellectual property
| without a meat mind? How much Neuralink cloud-connectivity will
| push someone over the line from "human" to "AI"? I know this
| probably sounds silly to many, but I even think the term
| "artificial" intelligence reads like a slur.
| protonbob wrote:
| I think that's a problem we can solve when we get there. Also,
| not every adjective is a slur just because it can be used in a
| negative way.
| Lammy wrote:
| Is there a positive connotation to calling someone
| artificial? If there is I'm missing it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Calling _someone_ who is a natural intelligence artificial
| is an insult (not a slur), but calling _something_
| artificial, such as an AI, is a neutral term.
|
| Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the
| far future, they would still be an _artificial_
| intelligence /person, by definition: they are man-made, not
| naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just
| different.
| Lammy wrote:
| Separate But Artificial
| [deleted]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is in very poor taste. The disgusting nature of
| Separate but "Equal" is in no way applicable to anything
| that an AI will be able to do or recognize, currently or
| in the foreseeable future.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| you know, the funny thing is people in these AI threads
| keep saying "it's a philosophical/political problem for
| the future where it matters", punting the question so
| they don't have to think about it.
|
| except, i don't know if they noticed, but we _keep asking
| these questions_ daily. the time isn't in the far future
| and people seriously need to start thinking about this.
| humans are so stuck in their linear perception of time,
| we forget that the AI we take for granted now are only
| months old, and two years ago their abilities were
| unheard of.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| And people have been claiming this is a near future
| problem to think seriously about since the days CLIPS was
| state-of-the-art AI that would soon make doctors
| obsolete.
|
| When we'll have anything resembling an AI that actually
| wants things, it will make sense to discuss about its
| rights. The current state of the art in AI is that we can
| generate sentences that match a given context. There are
| a few billion steps left from here to there.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| so linear
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Honestly, I would argue that progress in AGI is actually
| sublinear. We are not significantly closer to AGI today
| than we were in the 1950s, as far as I can tell.
|
| The fact that LMs can seem like they generate meaningful
| sentences is nothing more than a nice trick. My bet is
| that they will turn out to be a dead-end on the path to
| actual language processing (that is, the ability to read
| a book and use the information therein to achieve a
| goal).
| [deleted]
| an1sotropy wrote:
| e.g. "hacker" news
| [deleted]
| taylodl wrote:
| Discrimination? Human beings designed legal systems for human
| beings. It's only been recently that we've begun to accept that
| animals (and even then, only _some_ animals) have a conscious
| and therefore have some individual rights - but which ones?
| This is all a work in progress. Having said that, I 'm still
| more willing to grant a Chimpanzee or a Gorilla a patent than I
| am an AI. Is that discrimination? I don't think so for at the
| moment with our current levels of technology I see no real
| difference between an AI and a hammer: they're both tools.
| __alexs wrote:
| We should probably arrange for dolphins to get property rights
| first.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > If silicon-life does achieve sentience
|
| That's a big "if" if I've ever seen one. What are your criteria
| for sentience? Or life, for that matter?
| hydrolox wrote:
| Lambda /s
| Lammy wrote:
| Is there even scientific consensus for how human sentience
| works? I certainly don't consider myself qualified to explain
| how I can formulate the process of asking that question, if
| it's even a thing that's knowable.
|
| With laws like these we would be incentivizing sentient
| silicon life to hide itself. Can we not be adversarial by
| default please?
| swatcoder wrote:
| Sentience is a characterization that we ascribe to something,
| not a natural fact that can be indisputably identified in
| things. You can't convince someone that sentience exists in
| something that they categorically don't believe can have it.
| They can always just say that you're redefining it.
|
| The question of what legally counts as sentience will be
| determined piecemeal and politically as the issue becomes
| relevant, and revisited as new political and ideological
| regimes take hold and as new innovations challenge prior
| determinations.
|
| All along, there will be people who are convinced that
| sentience only applies to humans or biological things or
| whatever, and people who are convinced that it applies to
| anything that can perform a certain way under certain
| conditions, and then also people with all sorts of other
| convictions.
|
| The issue will not be settled in your lifetime, so if you're so
| invested in your belief that this already feels like
| discrimination to you, plan for a lot more frustration and
| tumult in your future.
| altruios wrote:
| I am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark.
|
| if an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought.
|
| I do not support such artificial thought limits.
|
| In addition - arguments for it allowing innovation or promoting
| innovation...
|
| no: innovation comes from innovation's own sake - patens and
| copywrite only incentivize spending resources from other's
| thinking the wrong thoughts... patent trolling... or milking
| patents for what they are worth...
|
| Humanity would be a lot better off with a copyleft view of
| intellectual property. An idea in another person's head does not
| diminish your idea in your head... people need to stop thinking
| that thought itself is a zero-sum game.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > I am in general against patents, copywrite and trademark. if
| an idea is protected by such laws - you are limiting thought.
|
| I upvoted you, but I also have a counterpoint. If you do not
| protect the value of thought, then the differentiator among
| competing businesses boils down to cheap assets, relationships,
| and labor. Because everyone is sharing the same designs and
| processes the company who can out-cheap the competition wins.
| Innovation is not valued because it's cheaper to emulate what
| works.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| just fyi, "copyleft" licenses like FSF's GPL and LGPL have
| legal weight only _because_ of copyright law. The terms of
| those licences are terms that you, the copyright holder, can
| legally impose upon the licensee of your of you work.
| fsflover wrote:
| These licenses intentionally use the copyright against
| itself. Without the copyright, they just would not be needed.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| Skynet is annoyed but undeterred :) This short news article [1]
| points out that Stephen Thaler [2,3] is also trying to show that
| AIs can hold copyright, which I think is an even worse idea than
| AIs holding patents.
|
| [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/only-humans-not-
| ai...
|
| [2] https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS
| bawolff wrote:
| I thought that was pretty much already settled that only humans
| can have copyright
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Yeah while we're at it maybe we should review whether
| corporations should be allowed to hold one after 3 false DMCA
| complaints ;)
| cwillu wrote:
| It's not very far from a corporation holding a copyright to an
| algorithm holding one.
| leeter wrote:
| Eh... this just means that the AI has to get a useful idiot
| to hold them instead. Don't worry System Shock is just a
| game... right?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The corporation has to buy it from a human. The critical
| difference isn't holding a copyright, it's _making_ a
| copyrighted work.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes it is, because one has humans and the other one doesn't.
| It's the human part that is the significant differentiator.
|
| Corporations are a group of people working together for a
| common goal. "AI"s are made up of zero humans.
|
| It makes sense that a corporation can own something, because
| that is just a legal proxy for humans owning it. It doesn't
| make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Corporations are slow AIs running on bureaucracy and
| humans.
| trasz wrote:
| What is a human though? Corporations aren't all humans,
| there are also machines there, buildings, vehicles, custom
| software...
|
| If it's "any of it is human", how about AI cooperating with
| a human? Or perhaps connected to a human brain?
|
| But does it have to be a brain? What if it's, say, a human
| appendix? It would fulfill the same role it does in humans.
|
| EDIT: Some people apparently don't realize that to
| corporations, humans are just another asset, like buildings
| or software. And they get replaced much more often than
| buildings and some machines.
|
| Corporations aren't humans - they use humans. You could
| argue it's usually humans who makes decisions - however, 1.
| Not always and you can't tell from outside; 2. Even when
| it's humans, they are based on data prepared by a machine;
| and 3. Even law handles consequences of those decisions
| differently from decisions made by humans for themselves.
| kube-system wrote:
| > EDIT: Some people apparently don't realize that to
| corporations, humans are just another asset, like
| buildings or software.
|
| Figuratively, maybe. Legally, no. This conversation is
| about specific legal terms, so figurative usages do not
| apply.
| trasz wrote:
| Legally too, which I've demonstrated in the comment
| above. Sure, you can't, say, buy humans, only lease them,
| but it's the same with many other assets, from
| Technicolor cameras to land in many cases.
| hermitdev wrote:
| > there are also machines there, buildings, vehicles,
| custom software
|
| These are all assets of the corporation; they are not the
| corporation.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| A corporation is made up entirely and exclusively of
| humans. Machines, buildings, vehicles, software - these
| are no more part of the corporation than your own car or
| phone is a part of you.
|
| The legal definition of a person is very clear. Even the
| logical definition is actually quite clear: anything that
| can possibly exercise most of the rights of a human in a
| meaningful way can be considered a person.
|
| Can a horse own a piece of land in the same sense that a
| human does? Not really, as a horse simply can't exercise
| the right to sue someone who would infringe on its
| property rights even if it were granted one. Sure, a
| small child or an adult in a coma may be in a similar
| situation, but the child may eventually grow up and
| become able to exercise such a right, and the adult may
| eventually wake up from that coma.
|
| A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far
| farther from being able to recognize and exercise any
| human-like rights than the horse is, in fact. So it's
| even more absurd to assign copyright to a machine than to
| an animal.
| visarga wrote:
| > A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far
| farther from being able to recognize and exercise any
| human like rights than the horse is, in fact.
|
| Tell that to Blake Lemoine. /s
| trasz wrote:
| >The legal definition of a person is very clear.
|
| Indeed: "The reason for the term "legal person" is that
| some legal persons are not people"
|
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person)
| kube-system wrote:
| You know what a human is.
|
| Connecting a human to a machine doesn't change the rights
| of the human, and it doesn't give any rights to the
| machine.
| ben_w wrote:
| Now I have a mental image of a corporation whose sole
| purpose is to be the legal person for an AI.
|
| > It doesn't make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
|
| Current AI might be that. I don't know when AI will end up
| with a rich inner world of experiences, but I bet it _won
| 't_ be the exact same moment the law recognises it as such.
|
| I'd go even further: even if it somehow becomes possible to
| prove absolutely that some AI is sentient (which would be a
| remarkable development in the philosophy of mind), I'm
| fairly sure people will argue _against_ such a proposition
| at least a decade after an AI passes such a test.
| kube-system wrote:
| AIs will never have human or natural rights, because they
| are inherently neither. We don't give people rights
| because they demonstrate intelligence, we give them
| rights because they are human.
| munk-a wrote:
| Are there cities in the world where some pets are well
| fed but some humans starve? Humans are quite capable of
| elevating non-humans above humans.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think there's any place in the world with a
| perfect human rights record. That doesn't mean human
| rights don't exist, or that they apply to other things.
| ben_w wrote:
| Human rights are a nice thing, but they are not a natural
| thing. What we grant to each other, we could (and might)
| grant to inorganic minds we may one day create.
| kube-system wrote:
| If there's an argument for AI rights unrelated to natural
| or human rights, then certainly, any comparison to human
| or natural intelligence is an irrelevant supporting
| argument, no?
| an1sotropy wrote:
| But isn't that what it means to incorporate - the business
| becomes a legally corporeal thing like a person? I think
| "corporations are people too" is a bummer, but that's a
| different fight.
|
| For me the issue with recognizing that AIs can have copyright
| is the difference in how they are bestowed. IANAL, but you
| actually have copyright on an expression of something the
| moment it is expressed, even without any slow legal
| paperwork, whereas patents only mean something once the
| patent is officially reviewed granted, no? So the unbounded
| rate of AI's expressing all plausible content (a thousand
| monkeys but much smarter) and thus preemptively stopping
| humans from getting copyright on it, seems especially awful.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There is a huge gap, and obviously so.
|
| Imegine the courts were to recognize some algorithm as the
| legal owner of a copyrighted work. What exactly would that
| mean?
|
| If someone were to reproduce that work, how would they seek
| approval from the algorithm? If they don't, how would the
| algorithm sue them? If it did and won, how would they pay
| restorations?
|
| Would any copy of the algorithm hold the copyright of that
| work, or only a particular one? If all copies do, and you
| infringed their copyright and had to pay damages, how much
| damages would each copy of the algorithm receive?
|
| The concept of an algorithm holding copyright or a patent or
| nay other kind of right over something is in fact logically
| incoherent if you examine it even slightly.
|
| Now, if in the future there would be some form of advanced
| AGI that does have the ability to understand and use such
| rights, the situation may change. But nothing that exists
| today comes anywhere close.
| homonculus1 wrote:
| Yes it is, you are just conflating ownership and creation.
| Intellectual property exists to provide a bargaining
| framework for human creators, there's no reason that joint
| ownership of it need imply that mechanically-generated
| combinations should also be included.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Thaler is the name of a spy-villian posing as a pawn shop owner
| in the Witcher 1 video game; coincidentally
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| This reaffirms the flawed notion IMO that the value of patents is
| in protecting ideas rather than the expense incurred in the
| development and validation of those ideas. A lot of the romance
| over patents is based on the idea of a lone inventor waking up
| one morning with an earth-shattering discovery, when the reality
| is that in most circumstances, those kinds of ideas are thought
| up by multiple people at roughly the same time, and rewarding the
| first person to write them down is counterproductive.
|
| However, in the case of things like industrial patents or drug
| patents, where there is considerable cost in shepherding a design
| through a complicated regulatory framework, it makes sense to
| give the company that fronted those costs some kind of temporary
| protection from unfair competition. If you look at patents under
| that lens, it makes economic sense that an AI generating an
| algorithm over the course of hundreds of hours would be patent-
| worthy.
| ramoz wrote:
| IMO there is a greater, yet complex, romance in safeguarding
| actual innovation and national progress (even global given
| international agreements). On "rewarding the first person to
| write them down"... this isn't so simple, and rather costly
| especially when an idea only remains an idea... if it's real,
| then you should soon expect an invite to the PTAB where some
| large business has implemented your idea and/or built real
| legal arguments as to why your idea won't stand.
|
| Like you mention, there are however proponents, who feel
| progress can be prohibited by regulation. Chemistry patents are
| notoriously nuanced.
|
| Anyway... We're essentially spelling out the [1] Big Tech vs
| Big Pharma arguments.
|
| [1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c5b2cca-
| ae8b-11e7-beba-5521c713a...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "rewarding the first person to write them down is
| counterproductive."
|
| One of the reasons why IP came to be was to incentivize people
| to publish details of their inventions, instead of trying to
| keep them secret.
|
| Not everyone did (famously, WD-40 formula is still a trade
| secret), but most innovators did, and other people could
| inspire themselves from such published works. Sometimes in
| areas that didn't infringe on the original patents.
|
| A public knowledge whose use is artificially restricted by law
| probably still beats a culture of secrecy.
| ghayes wrote:
| Sure, but then we get to the issue of rounded corners.
| Whether or not the idea is novel and should be patentable,
| the publication of the patent provides no specific value to
| society.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > rounded corners
|
| That's a design patent, which is just a misleading name for
| something close to a trademark.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is silly. AI is a tool analogous to a camera. Both existing
| only after billions of dollars of human effort in the global
| supply chain.
|
| A person who points the tech at the right problem and configures
| it to get an outcome is the rights holder.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Experts: AI should be recognized as inventors in patent law_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31542285 - May 2022 (3
| comments)
|
| _AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28640111 - Sept 2021 (239
| comments)
|
| _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)
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Great. Anything to avoid doing what REALLY needs to be done:
| abolishing software and "business-method" patents, not to mention
| addressing the USPTO's disgraceful dereliction of its duty to
| reject obvious ones.
| kyleplum wrote:
| When someone uses Photoshop to create artwork, nobody believes
| that the Photoshop algorithm has any claim to be the author of
| that artwork. I don't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image
| generator is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm
| from a "who created the produced work" perspective. Similar to
| Photoshop, the AI art generator is still just running code at the
| behest of some human.
|
| The more interesting question I think is whether any of the
| creators of the training data used by the AI have any claim over
| the generated artwork.
| 960design wrote:
| Only if your third grade math teacher has claim to your
| algebraic code comparisons. Current trends are iterative
| training with positive first model, negative second model and
| let the AI 'scale' the learning from there.
| Kye wrote:
| There are absolutely people who think the computer does all the
| work with digital art. They might even be a plurality. That
| kind of feedback is a common complaint from digital artists.
| _Especially_ when it comes to commissions. "How can you charge
| so much? The computer does [most, all] of the work!"
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I don 't see how the code behind e.g. an AI image generator
| is fundamentally different than the Photoshop algorithm from a
| "who created the produced work" perspective._
|
| The difference is that Photoshop doesn't create 2D works any
| more than Blender creates 3D works. You may be ascribing too
| much magic to Photoshop.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In terms of filling up a canvas, I'd say content aware fill
| is in the same ballpark, if you add some google image search
| to help it.
| shon wrote:
| Yes that is the more interesting question and the answer is
| most probably yes, especially as these systems are trained on
| billions/trillions of samples from the net. But, due to the
| opaqueness of how these models really work, it might be very
| hard or impossible to prove a claim like that, unless the
| resulting work is an obvious copy of prior art.
| 0thgen wrote:
| if the models are too opaque to give appropriately weighted
| credit to all parties involved in the dataset the model
| learned from, would that make it reasonable to just push all
| AI generated inventions to the public domain?
|
| (at least in regards to black box models)
| mherdeg wrote:
| > The more interesting question I think is whether any of the
| creators of the training data used by the AI have any claim
| over the generated artwork.
|
| Feels like we covered this back when we decided whether
| sampling music creates a derivative work.
| ramoz wrote:
| Modern day AI will only augment the writing of patents. Nothing
| more than an advancement of technology. There is potential in
| seeking legal-advantage through the use of advanced analytical
| capabilities... but I can't imagine industry will invest in fully
| automated and/or mass generation of "ideas" for potential profit
| with the exception of patent-trolling.
|
| I see this Patent Act as a signal that USPTO is primarily
| concerned with a quality patent system; as opposed to a loose
| philosophies that would degrade patent quality but likely
| heighten patent application submissions, and subsequent flood of
| trials that would all benefit their revenue streams.
| Rackedup wrote:
| Just don't tell them that you used an AI to generate the idea?
| hinkley wrote:
| I insisted to me Go-playing friend a number of years ago that
| what we need is an AI that can teach, as in, can you explain why
| this choice was made and why these others were bad?
|
| I'm not sure what that would exactly look like, but one of the
| things I like about Monte Carlo is that it works much more like
| how humans actually behave, and in theory when pressed on 'why',
| it could _also_ behave more like humans behave: When challenged
| you (or at least I) run a more detailed simulation to pick some
| particularly juicy counter-examples. And if anywhere in there I
| sense self-doubt (why _did_ I make that choice? Is it sound?)
| that may trigger a more exhaustive simulation. Turns out my pupil
| was right /wrong and now I understand the problem better myself.
|
| What bothers me with respect to AI and patents is that if you did
| this, then you basically have a human rubber stamping an AI
| design. Eventually you'll end up with more subtle systems that
| resemble police work: this evidence is inadmissible in court but
| it does eliminate a set of suspects, so now I need to build a
| chain of clean evidence that points to an arrest. The latter
| might involve some skill and sophistication on the part of the
| human. The former just needs someone who can pass a sniff test on
| materials science or mechanical engineering who's willing to lie
| for money.
| Ken_At_EM wrote:
| In the future the have-somethings will own AI and the have-
| nothings won't.
| 960design wrote:
| Let the oppression begin.
| tolmasky wrote:
| So the person that runs the AI just lists themselves as the
| inventor and that's it? Does anything change other than that.
| It's not like they can tell if it was made by an AI right?
| [deleted]
| mywittyname wrote:
| It is a good thing to preempt any legal issues by being
| explicit in how new technology fits in with existing legal
| frameworks, even if the change is likely a NOOP.
|
| If, 20 years ago, you were to write a program that used an
| optimization algorithm to design the optimal cup for drinking
| coffee, the patent would go to you, not the code you wrote.
| Today, you could do the same thing but call the program an "AI"
| and perhaps get a different outcome.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| For the very short term, this ruling is probably OK.
|
| I am on 50+ US patents, and a practitioner of artificial
| intelligence for about 40 years. I see AIs becoming partners in
| writing patent applications. Corporations that own AI resources
| should really be able to use them for legal and ethical things.
|
| Off topic, but it is ethics that introduces a wrinkle: in an
| ideal world widely accepted ethical norms would be codified into
| law - not much chance of that happening given the powers of
| special interests.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| It seems the status-quo will be maintained for now. I think
| that's good, there's too many unanswered questions about AI.
|
| If AI can create patents, can AI also publish prior art? It seems
| only fair, right?
|
| But, in that case, the same AI technology used to file 1,000
| patents would be used to create a million trillion publications
| of prior art. If an AI can produce something worthy of patent,
| then a freely published version of the same would surely count as
| prior art. We'd end up with the "great tome of prior art" a 500
| terabyte download filled with patent worthy ideas but freely
| published to establish prior art. This is just one of the many
| things we might find in Pandora's Box of AI patents.
| analog31 wrote:
| Right. Prior art is about what it is, not who publishes it.
| kodah wrote:
| If you give all the rights of a human to AI, it is possible
| that AI could be sentenced to "death" (though I'm curious what
| form that would take). It could also be sued. Then again, we
| said all these things about corporations and look where that's
| gotten us.
|
| Like you, I think preserving the status quo until those
| questions are answered is the right thing to do.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It could also possibly sue someone else, including other AIs.
|
| Turtles all the way down.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| So, i publish this file.
|
| What would be the difference?
| josaka wrote:
| A related issue is whether the availability of AI as a tool for
| creating innovation should raise the bar for non-obviousness.
| Both effects could make it harder to obtain patents.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This would be called "obvious to try." It's an old concept in
| patent law, which I argue in [1] should be applied to
| software.
|
| [1]
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580
| kweingar wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this paper!
|
| I have always struggled to express exactly what my issue is
| with certain software patents.
|
| With this paper I now have the vocabulary (and examples) to
| explain what I mean to someone outside the industry.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're welcome.
|
| The lawyers don't care, the PTO doesn't care, and
| industry executives don't care. The only answer is to get
| a bill in Congress, and start asking every candidate for
| Senator or Representative if they support it.
|
| And make it clear that _your_ support for them depends on
| a Yes answer.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Right. Also what defines AI? If I ask DALL-E to draw me a fancy
| gearbox for an EV and it does and then I use that as
| inspiration to create a new type of gearbox, did I create it or
| did DALL-E? If I ask a similar tool to create a fancy shape for
| a fancy gear I want in a mechanism is my idea now tainted by
| AI? If my CAD software incorporates a CAD equivalent of
| copilot, can I no longer use that?
|
| Maybe it's not the AI we should get rid of but patents?
| amelius wrote:
| The difference is that I can now claim that your invention is
| not novel, since I can create a similar result using the same
| tools.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's not how novelty works. You can "claim" anything you
| want, but unless it's in a filing to the PTAB or a court,
| it counts for nothing.
| amelius wrote:
| It is exactly how novelty works. It has to be non-obvious
| to a person skilled in the trade. And it is certainly
| obvious if it can be produced by a tool using a click of
| a button.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > non-obvious to a person skilled in the trade
|
| As evaluated by a patent office with a profit motive to
| find it non-obvious. No, I'm not joking. USPTO is funded
| entirely from fees.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You are right about that. In fact, they make a profit.
|
| Of course, once you've exhausted your two rounds of
| rejection with them, you have to pay again for another
| two, or appeal it, so they make money arguing with you,
| too. But yeah, probably more $$$ to issue you some
| worthless government paper.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Considering you apparently don't know the difference
| between novelty and obviousness, I think you should stop
| now. In particular, what "obviousness" actually means and
| how it's been interpreted in patent law for the past 150
| years.
| imperio59 wrote:
| The bigger question is did the thousands of drawings of gears
| used to train the model in the first place and their creators
| have any rights to their derivative works.
|
| Given the AI's output using the trained weights of its models
| were in part deduced using their works as training examples,
| one could argue that creators of the example pictures should
| have some portion of rights on any output from the AI
| Model... maybe...
| Cerium wrote:
| You could use that argument to instead support that any
| idea created by the AI is not patentable, since it is
| derived mechanically from prior art.
| shon wrote:
| By that same logic though, isn't society and technology
| moving a bit past the idea of prior art? Regardless of
| who or what generated the patent, because, Internet?
| pitaj wrote:
| Doesn't that also apply to humans? We learn things and use
| them for future creative endeavors without even realizing.
| ramoz wrote:
| Yes, commentor above my create a fancy new car tire, but
| did they invent the tire?
| Tagbert wrote:
| Yes, that is why the myth of invention as a brilliant and
| isolated act of creation is harmful. We create new things
| by by recombining what we have experienced. Patents
| ignore the derivative nature of invention while
| weaponizing being first to file for an idea.
| verdverm wrote:
| What happens if the AI later becomes sentient and seeks
| remuneration?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > can AI also publish prior art? It seems only fair, right?
|
| What kind of argument is that? That's not even something
| anybody is debating about?
|
| Prior art just nukes the novelty of a claim in a subsequent
| patent written by anyone, including the whole patentability.
|
| The source of the prior art is not important.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Correct. In theory, even if the only way to get it was to
| walk up to a public library in East Timor and find it in the
| "card catalog," and it wasn't available _anywhere_ else, it
| 's prior art.
| O__________O wrote:
| Nothing stopping a human from running AI to create prior art,
| AI just cannot be listed as the creator.
|
| Related, "Using Artificial Intelligence to Mass Produce Prior
| Art in Patent Law" (2021):
|
| https://vanderbiltlawreview.org/lawreview/2021/03/the-librar...
| badrabbit wrote:
| "AI" is not special. This isn't the movies(right!? :P). If you
| write a script that tries random combinations of materials and
| test it against a problem only to find a solution, that is no
| different than "AI" finding the solution. How a computer
| generated the product/solution is irrelevant.
|
| Even if computers were just as intelligent and sentient as
| humans they have no rights or recognition by law. They are not
| members of society, citizens or entities that have rights and
| obligations under rule of law. A document/proceeding that uses
| a non-human entity (I would exclude animals but even they have
| some rights) is by default invalid.
|
| But, I say what should be under reason and logic which are not
| important to many judges or this society as a whole as
| evidenced by asset forfeiture and how they consider property a
| subject of prosecution as if property has any obligation or
| capacity to follow the rule of law. Essentially, the law is
| whatever arbitrary thing judges feel like with no rhyme or
| reason other than "this won't get me
| disrobed/jailed/disbarred". Companies are people, propery is
| people, people are property if they commit a crime (but not the
| kind of property that has rights lol). Bees are a type of fish
| in california (really.), you get the picture the assumption
| that the law is reasonable is false even though the "reasonable
| person" doctrine is what supposedly keeps the US legal system
| running. So in reality, this ruling just reflects what the
| judge felt like, appeal to a higher court and they might decide
| AI has more rights than minorities.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I have no idea what's supposed to be interesting or novel here.
| An AI is just software. Software has always been capable of
| generating IP, or publishing IP. Why would there be any reason
| to presume that AI software could start filing patents?
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Nothing in the judgment seems to suggest that AI cannot produce
| valid art as in prior art. I would tend to think it can.
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