On Wednesday, a US computer scientist lost a bid to register patents for inventions created by his artificial intelligence system in a UK landmark case on whether AI can own patent rights, Reuters reported.
Stephen Thaler wanted to obtain two patents in the UK for inventions he claimed were invented by his “creative machine” called DABUS. His attempt to register the patents was rejected by Britain’s Intellectual Property Office on the grounds that the inventor must be a person or company, not a machine.
Thaler appealed to the UK Supreme Court, which on Wednesday unanimously rejected his appeal, because under UK patent law “an inventor must be a natural person.”
Judge David Kitchin said in the court’s written ruling:
This appeal is not concerned with the broader question whether technical advances generated by machines acting autonomously and powered by AI should be patentable.
The judge also noted that this did not address the question of whether the meaning of “inventor” should be extended to include “machines powered by AI which generate new and non-obvious products and processes which may be thought to offer benefits over products and processes which are already known.”
Thaler’s lawyers stated that “the judgement establishes that UK patent law is currently wholly unsuitable for protecting inventions generated autonomously by AI machines.”
Earlier this year, Thaler lost a similar bid in the US, where the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the US Patent and Trademark Office’s refusal to grant patents for inventions created by his AI system.
