Artificial intelligence cannot be legally named as an inventor to secure patent rights, the UK Supreme Court has ruled. In a judgment on Wednesday, Britain’s highest court concluded that “an inventor must be a person” in order to apply for patents under the current law. The ruling comes after the technologist Dr Stephen Thaler took his long-running dispute with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to the country’s top court over its rejection of his attempt to list an AI he created as the inventor for two patents. The US-based developer claims the AI machine named DABUS autonomously created a food or drink container and a light beacon and that he is entitled to rights over its inventions. However, the IPO concluded in December 2019 that the expert was unable to officially register DABUS as the inventor in patent applications because it was not a person. The decision was upheld by the high court and the court of appeal in July 2020 and July 2021. After a hearing in March, a panel of five supreme court justices have unanimously dismissed Thaler’s case. The DABUS dispute centred on how applications are made under the Patents Act 1977 legislation, and the judges were not asked to rule on whether the AI actually created its inventions. Lord Kitchin, with whom Lords Hodge, Hamblen, Leggatt and Richards agreed, said the IPO “was right to decide that DABUS is not and was not an inventor of any new product or process described in the patent applications”.
Full story : Artificial Intelligence cannot be patent ‘inventor’, UK Supreme Court rules in landmark case.
