Comment by kube-system
5 hours ago
Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.
The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.
So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.
Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.
Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.
Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. The owner (person or corp) gets protection. AI is attributed as contributor or inventor.
With that said, AI contribution should always be disclosed in every medium that it participated in, including patents.
> Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works.
This sentence contradicts itself. The reason we attribute inventors is because we recognize it as a legal right. Patents exist to give humans, whether working individually or in a group, an exclusive right to that invention for a period of time, as a legal protection for the activity of inventing.
My math teacher made me say whether or not I used a calculator. But that's not a requirement for patents.
You don't need to say what tools you used, even if you used a really big calculator.
Also, calculators don't anthropomorphize into inventors when they get really big. Inventing is, by definition, only something humans can do. Even other living creatures cannot be inventors.
> an exclusive right to that invention for a period of time, as a legal protection for the activity of inventing.
Can you cite this? What I know is that only Twitter back in the day created this framework that would give inventors the right to disallow for their patents to be used for patent infringement lawsuits. Otherwise, not even the inventor(s) have the right to infringe on their own patents. Inventors have no rights at all. Or if you know otherwise, I would love to hear it.
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Even if you were to extend rights to non-human entities, there's still a practical matter in that the legal system does not know how to compel testimony from an LLM (or a monkey for that matter, for a past attempt at copyrighting a photograph taken by a non-human primate)
And the entire point of a patent is to allow an inventor to profit from their invention for a fixed period of time to encourage inventors to invent things.
This makes no sense when applied to a box of numbers. Numbers cannot have money, numbers are not motivated to make money, numbers cannot do anything on their own.
This isn't real-life sesame street where today's episode was brought to us by a walking and talking number 7.