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Timestamp: 2019-04-24 23:46:13+00:00

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4 public policy, we should not be encouraging undirected, unsupervised innovations by AIs without some form of significant human oversight and responsibility. Thus, to discourage the creation of undirected AIs, there may be an argument for not providing patents to anyone for inventions even partially conceived by an AI. Instead there should be a middle ground under which patent rights remain generally available for human co-inventors to incentivize humans to remain involved and materially contribute to the conception of an invention. Conversely, as machines do not require incentives to innovate, but are simply created or instructed to do so, there is no need to grant inventor status to an AI for its role in the conception process. In this way, patents would remain available for all patentable inventions created with the aid of an AI except, perhaps, in the very extreme cases of inventions wholly conceived by selfdirecting AIs. Without this exception, however, there would be no incentive for humans to maintain direct oversight and responsibility for the control of a creative AI when such individuals could simply sit back and be rewarded with patent rights for an invention for which they had no part in conceiving. Instead, by refusing to allow a patent for inventions conceived wholly by AIs, we would avoid overly rewarding human owners of AIs simply for owning a creative machine, and would simultaneously encourage their more active participation in and control of the process should they not want any resulting inventions to fall to the public domain. A separate, perhaps less important, benefit of limiting inventorship to human activity is that, under such an approach, existing patent laws seem well disposed to handle questions of inventorship on a case-bycase basis. Evaluating each case individually, we should be able to consider the circumstances and identify which, if any, of the humans responsible in whole or in part for the AI s discoveries qualify as inventors. Conclusion It doesn t seem too controversial that, just because some form of AI technology is involved in the conception of a patentable invention, we shouldn t throw out the baby with the bath water and refuse to grant a patent. Ready or not, the pace of AI advancement is likely to increase, and the resulting uses only likely to further proliferate, as we continue through the 21st century. We should thus continue to provide incentives for our future inventors through the general availability of patents for their patentable innovations, even when an AI is involved in the process. That said, incentivizing innovation does not mean losing sight of the need for human responsibility for artificial creations. Human oversight and overall control of AI is an important safeguard against unintended consequences. As a result, patents should generally be available for inventions conceived in whole or in part by AI technologies, but with some exceptions to ensure, as a matter of public policy, that humans stay in the loop. In the case in which no human provides a material contribution to the conception of an invention, patent protection should be withheld for lack of inventorship in part to encourage humans to remain significantly involved in the process. In addition, evaluating each case on its own merits, existing legal frameworks for inventorship should then allow us to fairly determine who should be an inventor for patentable inventions conceived in whole or in part by an AI.
5 Mark Lyon is a partner, Alison Watkins is a senior associate and Ryan Iwahashi is an associate in the the Palo Alto, California, office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.  See Burroughs Wellcome Co. v. Barr Laboratories, Inc., 40 F.3d 1223, (Fed. Cir. 1994) ( Conception is the touchstone of inventorship, the completion of the mental part of invention. ).  See Hybritech, Inc. v. Monoclonal Antibodies, Inc., 802 F.2d 1367, 1376 (Fed. Cir. 1986) (quoting 1 Robinson on Patents 532 (1890)); Burroughs Wellcome, 40 F.3d at  See Board of Educ. v. American Bioscience, 333 F.3d 1330, 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2003) ( [T]eaching skills or general methods that somehow facilitate a later invention, without more, does not render one a coinventor. ).  See Sewall v. Walters, 21 F.3d 411 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (holding that a person that follows another s instructions to implement an invention is not a co-inventor).  See Board of Educ. v. American Bioscience, 333 F.3d 1330, 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2003).  University of Utah v. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Zur Forderung Der Wissenschaften EV, 734 F.3d 1315, 1323 (Fed. Cir. 2013); see also Beech Aircraft, 990 F.2d at 1248 fn. 23 (Fed. Cir. 1993).  While an open question in the patent context, it should be noted that the Copyright Office has issued a regulation stating that it will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author, (Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices (3d ed. 2014) 313.2) (a ruling which is subject to debate in its own right); see also Naruto v. Slater, No. 15-cv-4324, 2016 WL , at *3 4 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 28, 2016 (challenging the standing of a non-human animal to raise a claim of copyright infringement). See Ryan Abbott, I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law, 57 B.C.L. Rev (2016), see also Erica Fraser, Computers as Inventors Legal and Policy Implications of Artificial Intelligence on Patent Law, (2016) 13:3 SCRIPTed  This scenario requires significant advancement in the state of AI technologies from where things stand today, but is by no means out of the realm of future possibility.
6  Of course, even without patent rights, the owner of an AI may still have available other forms of intellectual property ownership and protection, such as trade secret rights, for inventions whollyconceived by an AI. All Content , Portfolio Media, Inc.
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