Inventors must be natural persons, EPO says
The European Patent Office has said it rejected two patent applications naming the machine Dabus as an inventor because European law requires an inventor to be a “natural person”.
The two European patent applications were filed last year by a team at the University of Surrey, and described a flashing beacon light and a plastic food container.
The two applications listed the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machine Dabus as the sole inventor.
Last December, the EPO rejected the patents because they did not meet the requirements for inventorship under the European Patent Convention (EPC).
Yesterday, the office published its reasons for the decision, stating that the EPC was written with the “clear legislative understanding that the inventor is a natural person”.
Giving the machine a name was also immaterial, the EPO said, as “names given to things may not be equated with names of natural persons”.
“Things have no rights which a name would allow them to exercise,” the EPO reasoning stated.
The grounds of refusal also reiterated the EPO’s position that machines have no “legal personality”.
For machines to have a legal personality or legal rights, lawmakers would have to pass legislation specifically to this effect, the EPO said.
The inventor of Dabus, Stephen Thaler, had claimed that he was the natural successor in right to the machine.
But machines are not capable of assigning rights, the EPO concluded.
"The EPO is effectively saying that it thinks the only people who are capable of patenting an invention are natural persons,” Peter Finnie, partner at Potter Clarkson, told WIPR.
Finnie suggested that, as technology becomes more advanced, the law around machines’ rights may need to be changed.
“As things stand at the moment, machine learning platforms have no personal identity whatsoever. That needs to be addressed if we believe that, in future, the act of innovation is going to be partially or even wholly carried out by a computer,” Finnie said.
Technology-focused IP consultant Alexander Weir said that such a change in the law was inevitable.
“The time will come when AI will be accepted as the inventor, because the patent system is going to have to adapt to the available technology,” Weir said.
On February 11, WIPR will be hosting a webinar on ‘ Patenting Artificial Intelligence’, in collaboration with law firm HGF.
Susan Keston and Jeff Clarke, partners at HGF, will review practical examples from EPO case law of attempts to protect AI inventions.
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