IP Review Winter 2019/20

IP review winter 2019/20 10 While patents for inventions which involve considerable design input by computers have been and continue to be granted, the concept of computer inventorship has never actually been considered by the courts. The concept of giving creative computers the credit for their own inventions may sound surreal but, in reality, AI based innovation has occurred for a number of years. Computer based innovation Professor Ryan Abbott and a team of academics have been involved in a project working alongside the Missouri- based inventor of Dabus AI, to seek patent protection for two innovations - an interlocking food container, which is easy for robots to handle, and a warning light that flickers in a rhythm similar to neural activity, which makes it difficult to ignore. The patent applications have been filed in the UK, Europe and the US. Developed by Stephen Thaler in 1994, Dabus AI or ‘The Creativity Machine’ as it is more commonly known, is a computational paradigm which claims to replicate human cognition. It can create novel patterns of information and adapt to different scenarios without human intervention. Among its outputs, the machine has been credited with inventing a prominent design aspect of the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush. Other examples of creative computing include a method for monitoring traffic control systems, developed by the Urban Software Institute and described in patent EP 3144918. Designed to improve traffic flow, the system includes multiple traffic lights that predict future signal status using a machine-learning algorithm. In a further example, an AI-system developed by IBM, known as ‘Watson’, uses algorithms to generate novel ideas based on pre-determined parameters. In its latest incarnation, Watson can generate innovative recipes based on user preferences and the predicted quality of the dish. Whilst such systems have been used to aid and inform the design process, they also require some form of human input to evaluate the output. Questions under the current law Under current patent law, patent applications must include one or more named inventors who must each be a ‘person’ or ‘individual’, rather than a corporate entity. To qualify as an Patents The news of a group of academics and inventors attempting to name an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system as an inventor on a number of patent applications has raised issues as to whether the law on inventorship is in need of reform. Can AI systems really be inventors?

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