A US federal district court confirmed that AI systems cannot patent inventions, as they are not human. The Verge reports.
According to Judge Leonard P. Stark, the Patent Act makes it clear that ownership of an invention can be held only by a natural person. In line with a US Supreme Court ruling, the term “person” usually means a human being.
“This is one of those cases where the question of interpreting the law begins and ends with the plain meaning of the text… There is no ambiguity: The Patent Act requires inventors to be natural persons, that is, human beings,” Stark concluded.
This decision is the latest in a string of court battles between scientist Stephen Thaler and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Since 2019, the engineer has sought to secure authorship for the image “Recent Entry into Paradise” generated by the Creativity Machine algorithm. The US Copyright Office (USPTO) refused to register it for Thaler.
In 2021 the court upheld the USPTO’s decision. Now the federal district court has again confirmed the ruling.
Thaler and his counsel Ryan Abbott plan to appeal the decision, criticizing the court’s “narrow and textual approach” to the Patent Act.
“He ignores the purpose of the Patent Act and the fact that AI-generated inventions are no longer patentable in the United States. This is the result with real negative social consequences,” Abbott said.
Earlier, in February the rejected the application for registration of the intellectual property of an artwork object, created by a machine-learning algorithm.
In June, the inventor sought to patent a painting generated by an AI model.
In August, business and IP representatives in the United States called for rewriting patent laws for artificial intelligence.
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