The UK Intellectual Property Office has ruled that artificial intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being.
Patents transfer ownership of a new invention to its creator.
A recent IPO consultation revealed that many experts doubt that AI can currently invent without human help.
Current law allows people to patent inventions made with the help of AI, the government said, despite “false assumptions” that is not the case.
Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who said his Dabus AI system should be recognized as an inventor in two patent applications:
- a food container
- a blinking light
The judges, by a two-to-one majority, sided with the IPO, which had asked it to name a real person as the inventor.
“Only a person can have rights – not a machine,” wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgment.
“A patent is a legal right and can only be granted to a person.”
But the IPO also said it needed to “understand how our IP regime is designed to protect AI-developed inventions in the future” and pledged to advance international discussions to keep the UK competitive.
In July 2021, in a case also brought by Mr. Thaler, an Australian court ruled that AI systems could be recognized as inventors for patent purposes.
Days earlier, South Africa had issued a similar ruling.
Many AI systems are trained with large amounts of data copied from the Internet.
And on Tuesday, the IPO also announced plans to amend copyright law to allow anyone with lawful access — and not just those conducting non-commercial research, as they are now — to “allow the use of AI technology and beyond.” support financially”. Data mining techniques for the public good”.
Rightsholders will still be able to control access to and charge for their works, but will no longer charge additional fees for the ability to mine them.
More and more people are using AI tools like DALL.E 2 to create images that resemble a human work of art.
And Mr. Thaler recently sued the US Copyright Office for its refusal to recognize a software system as the “author” of an image, the Register reported.
In the consultation, the IPO noted that the UK is one of only a handful of countries protecting computer-generated works without a human creator.
The “author” of a “computer-generated work” is defined as “the person by whom the necessary arrangements for the creation of the work are taken,” it says.
And the protection lasts 50 years from the creation of the work.
Performing arts union Equity had called for a copyright change to protect actors’ livelihoods from AI content such as “deepfakes” generated from images of their face or voice.
The IPO took this issue seriously, it said, but “at this stage, the impact of AI technologies on artists remains unclear.”
“We will keep an eye on these issues,” he added.
Add Comment