This week, a federal court of the United States maintains a previous decision of the American Patent and Trademark Office (GPT) saying that artificial intelligence (AIs) cannot be considered inventors. But this brigade is not over for Stephen Thaler or home who moved to ação to guarantee that artificial intelligence has the right to appear as inventors of patents.
It all started in 2019 when Thaler applied for two patents on the GPT, a food container based on fractal geometry and an emergency beam. But the patents did not list Thaler, founder of Imagination Engines, as an investor. DABUS would have created the inventions, a neural network, or AI, programmed by him.
The GPT ended up rejecting the patents, claiming that only “natural persons” can be listed as inventors in these types of documents. Thaler was unable to comply and sued Andrei Iancu, director of the patent office at the time, in a Virginia court over the decision.
We. Process documents, Thaler’s attorney maintains that “There is no statute or clause that says that an AI-generated invention cannot be patented, or that an AI cannot be listed as an inventor. Any discussion of inventors as natural persons has been based on the assumption that only one person can invent or prohibit the patents of corporations or states at the expense of a human inventor. “
The judging process, Leonie Brinkema, disagreed and upheld the decision of GPT: only “individuals” can swear that invented a patent, and individuals are “natural persons,” the software does.
But Thaler and his lawyers plan to appeal the decision in US courts. And it may not be in vain: an Australian court agreed with him that IA could be considered inventors last month.
“It’s the humans who are denying these rights in the first place, stuck in the old paradigm that only meat computers count, that is, brains,” Thaler said. he told The Register. “What happens when scientists manage to download human consciousness into machines? Will the system deny these people their rights? “Good question.