(FreedomBeacon.com)- According to a report, an American software engineer filed a groundbreaking lawsuit asking the UK Supreme Court to rule that he is permitted to patent for breakthroughs by his AI system. The suit is part of a more extensive debate about whether or not artificial intelligence can own patent rights.
Stephen Thaler wants to get patents in the U.k. for two improvements that he says result from the “creativity machine” that he calls DABUS.
His effort to file the patents was turned down on the basis that the originator of the invention must be a human being or business and not a piece of machinery.
Robert Jehan, Thaler’s attorney, argued at the Supreme Court that there is no requirement in UK patent law that an invention must have a human creator in order to be patentable.
The report shows the intellectual property department of the UK., which had previously turned down petitions submitted by Thaler in 2019, said that the case ought to be turned down.
Thaler’s attempts to file identical applications in several countries were denied, but his application to register DABUS as an inventor in South Africa was accepted.
Patent lawyer Mark Marfé, who isn’t a party to the dispute, said that the laws governing patents would need to be changed so that a computer could be acknowledged as a creator.
According to a technology law website, DABUS is an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by Dr. Stephen Thaler and programmed to imitate features of how the human brain works.
Dr. Thaler submitted many patent applications claiming a food container and a strobing light for enticing attention were invented exclusively by DABUS as the outcome of its own inventive functionality.
The applications claimed Dr. Thaler as the patent holder but identified DABUS as the inventor. Since then, patent offices, courts, and legal experts have been baffled by the question of whether or not a patent application may be legitimate if it identifies a non-human inventor.
