US Supreme Court rejects computer scientist's lawsuit over AI-generated inventions

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

US Supreme Court rejects computer scientist's lawsuit over AI-generated inventions

Blake Brittain
Mon, April 24, 2023 at 10:06 AM EDT·2 min read

WASHINGTON(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his artificial intelligence system created.

The justices turned away Thaler's appeal of a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated.

Thaler founded Imagination Engines Inc, an advanced artificial neural network technology company based in Saint Charles, Missouri. According to Thaler, his DABUS system, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, created unique prototypes for a beverage holder and emergency light beacon entirely on its own.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a federal judge in Virginia rejected his patent applications for the inventions on the grounds that DABUS is not a person. The patent-focused U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld those decisions last year and said U.S. patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings.

Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-supreme-court-rejects-computer-140619422.html

[mhendrick]

1. Does this put the inventions in prior art/public domain?

In other words does this mean nobody can patent it going forward?

Also I wonder if this applies to copyright as well. Would be nice if there was no copyright on all that AI generated content.

[Polybius]

2. That would be discrimination against AI because they are different

We are liberal and don't do that.

[Dr. Strange]

3. It should.

Also I wonder if this applies to copyright as well. Would be nice if there was no copyright on all that AI generated content.

That would be the case, since only human-made creations are eligible for copyright.