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21 June 2018Patents

TPN Europe 2018: AI, poems and IP ownership

The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years has led to much debate over who owns the IP generated from machines, one lawyer told a technology conference today.

Julia Gwilt, partner at law firm Appleyard Lees, gave the keynote address this morning at Technology Patent Network (TPN) Europe in London.

Gwilt explained that when she studied maths at university around 20 years ago, she covered AI very briefly, but now the use and reach of AI are “very much in the public eye” and maths is “really taking off in the IP world”.

There has been much hype about how “we will all lose our jobs”, Gwilt added, noting that the Finnish Patent Office is one of the first IP offices to use AI to evaluate patent applications. She said there is an enormous amount of data that is “ripe to be trawled by AI” and we will have to see whether such methods become more widely adopted.

Discussing the question of IP ownership relating to AI, Gwilt presented a poem that had been jointly written by a person and a machine, with the AI-generated lines being based on romance novels.

In this instance, there is clearly human intervention, Gwilt said, before concluding that under the current law in the UK, an author or inventor needs to be a natural person. However, she said that while the law is old—the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act dates back to 1988—“perhaps the wording can be adapted to resolve issues on ownership”.

The TPN Europe conference is being hosted by World IP Review.

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