Dabus team urges EPO to reconsider AI-inventor policy
The team pushing for IP offices to recognise artificial intelligence (AI) as an inventor on patents has appealed an adverse decision of the European Patent Office (EPO).
Led by Professor Ryan Abbott at the University of Surrey, the team is seeking patent protection for a plastic food container invented by “creativity machine” Dabus.
Dabus is an AI application created by physicist Stephen Thaler and is supposedly capable of generating novel ideas. Abbott’s team has filed patent applications around the world listing Dabus as the inventor of the plastic food container.
The campaign effectively proposes rewriting IP law, as no AI application has to date been recognised anywhere as the inventor on a granted patent.
The EPO rejected the application in December, commenting that under the European Patent Convention (EPC), only human beings or ‘natural persons’ may be considered inventors.
In the appeal, Thaler told the EPO that retaining the ban on AI-inventors would only encourage deception from applicants, and act as a disincentive for innovation, Bloomberg Law reported.
The appeal is an expected development in the Dabus team’s effort to challenge the governing principles of patent law. Abbott has previously told WIPR that the aim of the applications is to “raise awareness and effect change”.
They say that the ban on AI-inventors is out of step with a rapidly changing economy in which machines and AI are becoming more powerful, and more important in driving innovation.
The ban will also lead to inaccurate patents, or stop AI-invented technologies from being patented, they say, as applicants will have to falsely list non-human inventors.
But so far, IP offices have stood firm. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) handed the Dabus team a final rejection of their patent application in April, closing the door on any further appeals.
Like the EPO, the USPTO cited the “plain language” of the statutes governing patent law, which make it clear that only human beings can be ‘inventors’ of patented technology.
The Dabus team had tried to persuade the USPTO that policy considerations, such as incentivising innovation and stopping the improper naming of persons as inventors.
But these policy considerations “do not overcome the plain language of the patent laws as passed by the Congress and as interpreted by the courts,” the USPTO said in its final decision.
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