Is intellectual property law ready for artificial intelligence [Beginner's Guide]

Last updated : Sept 3, 2022

Can AI have intellectual property rights?

Programmers of AI systems can already obtain some IP protection through copyright in the computer code and patents over the functionality of the software they write.

What is artificial intelligent in intellectual property?

AI is generally considered to be a discipline of computer science that is aimed at developing machines and systems that can carry out tasks considered to require human intelligence. Machine learning and deep learning are two subsets of AI.

Should artificial intelligence be protected by copyright?

Artificial intelligence is already being used to generate works in music, journalism and gaming. These works could in theory be deemed free of copyright because they are not created by a human author. As such, they could be freely used and reused by anyone.

Can artificial intelligence be patented?

Then, earlier this month, in a parallel case involving a copyright issue with Thaler's AI system, a US federal circuit court upheld a 2021 decision confirming that, as per the language of the Patent Act, AI systems cannot patent inventions because they are not human beings.

Who owns artificial intelligence?

Patent law generally considers the inventor as the first owner of the invention. The inventor is the person who creates the invention. In the case of autonomous AI generating an invention, there is no legal owner as the AI technology cannot own the invention.

Is artificial intelligence an intangible assets?

Thus we can think of AI as using a combination of tangible assets (hardware) with measured intangibles (software) and unmeasured intan- gibles (databases).

What is artificial intelligence with examples?

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision.

Is artificial intelligence patentable in India?

Over 5,000 AI patents filed over the last decade in India- 94% of them filed in the previous five years. 60%+ of patents filed originated in India.

What is intellectual property?

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.

Can artificial intelligence be an author?

Both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and United States Copyright Office have consistently denied applications for intellectual property protection over AI-generated works because the AI-generated works lack “human” inventorship or authorship.

Are AI-generated images royalty free?

Generated photos are created from scratch by AI systems. All images can be used for any purpose without worrying about copyrights, distribution rights, infringement claims, or royalties.

Can you use commercial art in AI?

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly used to create impressively good artworks, and some of these AI-generated images are being sold for large sums of money. Can You Sell AI-Generated Artwork Too? Yes, you can sell AI-generated artwork.

Are AI generated inventions patentable?

People have claimed to have secured patents for AI-generated inventions since at least the 1980s, but no one has ever disclosed an AI's role in such a patent application.

How many AI patents are there?

History of AI Since that time innovators and researchers have published over 1.6 million AI-related scientific publications and filed patent applications for nearly 340,000 AI-related inventions.

What company has the most AI patents?

As of December 2021, Tencent was the largest owner of active machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) patent families worldwide with 9,614 families owned. In 2020, the company had claimed the leading position from Microsoft now ranked sixth with 5,821 active families owned.

Does Elon Musk own OpenAI?

OpenAI, the nonprofit artificial intelligence research organization founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman — and which Musk later quit — is now legally a for-profit company.

Who is leading in AI?

While the market for AI products and services is fragmented, IBM is leading the industry. Market research firm IDC ranked IBM as the leader in AI software platforms with a 13.7% market share in 2020, up 46% from the prior year.

Who is the CEO of artificial intelligence?

Sundar Pichai: AI Needs to Be Regulated Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has stressed the importance of regulating artificial intelligence, calling for change that would hamper the dangers of facial recognition and deepfakes.

Who owns AI generated inventions?

The invention and any patent granted over it, belongs either to the human deviser or to the employer (if an employee devices invention). Another issue that may well arise in the future is one of joint ownership.

What are the 4 types of AI?

According to the current system of classification, there are four primary AI types: reactive, limited memory, theory of mind, and self-aware.

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good evening everyone i was about to say good morning but we're just on the brink so good evening everyone uh welcome back to another session of the ai week series uh i openheartedly hope that you've been enjoying what you've been seeing so far we had some great responses from you in our previous sessions uh we hope that you continue to participate in that today's session just to remind you that's using either the q a function to ask a question or just pop a comment in the chat um both of them are welcome and today with me i've got er stravrolla who'll be talking about intellectual property in ai a very interesting uh topic we spoke about it quite a lot previously but without further ado would you like to take it away yeah thank you so much christian and thank you for inviting me so i do understand that you are all somehow familiar with a lot of artificial intelligence tools uh probably you do not know the legal uh background and the legal framework that is governing artificial intelligence currently as we will be discussing there are no laws that specifically tackle artificial intelligence in the uk but there is an ongoing discussion and the uk intellectual property office has launched a consultation fairly recently about a discussion on how ai can be accommodated by the current intellectual property laws so the plan of my presentation today is to give you a rough outline on intellectual property to give you an overview of legal areas that can cover artificial intelligence and if so to what extent and also to look at uh challenges and specific issues that pertain to artificial intelligence and intellectual property so in terms of the outline of what i'm planning to discuss today first i will offer you a definition of intellectual property law clearly if you have any questions as i talk you are very welcome to interrupt by asking any questions on the chat box or the q a forum i will be following that hopefully and i will be able to respond to ad hoc questions uh then i will start talking about how artificial intelligence challenges intellectual property law you should know that all of this discussion is fairly recent at least in the area of intellectual property law because firstly these are new technologies but this is not the only reason there are ways in which artificial intelligence becomes the more and more challenging with regards to how the law can cope and the number of questions have been raised as well at the legislative level on whether we need to revise current laws in order to facilitate artificial intelligence or accommodate certain activities that are beneficial for the public interest and there are certain legally challenging questions that i would like to focus on because i understand many of you might also be engaged into the development of artificial intelligence or have ideas about applications that might be using artificial intelligence so one of these questions is can artificial intelligence machines create and perhaps even own intellectual property rights can artificial intelligence infringe intellectual intellectual property rights of others and if so how can this take place and also what are the available uses uses that are permitted by intellectual property laws that could be accommodated easily under the uh current legal framework and also finally do we really need new intellectual property laws so uh starting by a definition of intellectual property intellectual property is an overreach an overarching term used to refer to industrial property as well as copyrights the so-called in the intellectual property per se in some jurisdiction and it is us some authors have said an amorphous bundle of rights so effectively we have a number of rights that can be generated and can be falling under the umbrella of intellectual property rights these include copyright which protects the artistic literary dramatic works musical works it can include patents trademarks designs and so on and what brings all of these together to some is that they are all creations of the mind they are all ideas that take a particular form and hence the way in which they are expressed deserves protection so this gives you here an outline of the forms of intellectual property intellectual property is a form of knowledge and everything that is generated under intellectual property laws is knowledge that is worth protecting in the particular way in which it has been expressed so we do have patents that protect useful ideas this can cover from computer programs in some jurisdictions to genes and the development of gene patterns to medicine or even to specific applications that are sufficiently innovative to attract patent law protection we have copyright which protects original expressions of certain ideas and that could be works of art that could be films broadcasts um musical works dramatic works like dance or mime and so on then we have trademarks these are distinctive identities that are usually uh attached to products but it does not have to be something that will be attached to products from coca-cola to kfc and to other distinctive identities we speak about certain names or certain figurative marks that will identify goods and services that are available in the market and for everyone who is about to embark into an enterprise and the business this is something that will be uh probably the starting point how to identify the goods and services that they are going to launch in the market how they are going to distinguish themselves in the marketplace and then we have designs we speak again about distinctive identities but these are going to have a physical application because here we speak about goods that take a particular shape and because of the shape that they take they deserve they receive protection just on the shape of specific goods so these are some basic intellectual property rights we do have some other sub rights under intellectual property law and they can include for instance breach of confidentiality confidentiality is also something that intellectual property laws protect again in terms of the subject matter of protection i'm giving you here a rough outline of the criteria of protection and i'm offering this outline because i would like you to reflect on how ai can be a challenge what is it that ai can do in order to impact on intellectual property and the way in which the law applies so for trademarks as i told you we have distinctive identities badges that indicate the origin of goods or services when you buy a coca-cola can you do not know exactly how it will taste from jurisdiction to jurisdiction it does not taste the same everywhere but you know that this is something that is branded by the coca-cola company and you put some trust into the fact that you will probably be drinking coca-cola uh and then when we speak about industrial designs we speak about the look and shape of products from the shape of cars to the shape of everyday objects like the mug that christian just used to drink his coffee everything like that can be designed protected when we speak about distinctiveness as a criterion for protection for trademarks

Thanks for your comment Russel Malinchalk, have a nice day.
- Raelene Yurkanin, Staff Member

okay welcome everybody I'm mark Laemmle I am a professor at Stanford Law School and director of the program in law science and technology I am also a partner at the dirt angry law firm and I do both intellectual property work and increasingly scholarship on artificial intelligence let me briefly introduce our panelists and then I want to hear a little bit from the audience about sort of background level of knowledge interests and that sort of thing I said to my left is dr. Ryan Abbott who is a professor at the University of Surrey in the UK at the law school also a professor in the School of Medicine at UCLA and chiropractor has a very careers has written quite a bit in intellectual property and AI as well as other things like should robots pay taxes and has a forthcoming book on the subject Chris you might have to bring your own tiara maybe there's one over there to my right is at least I will let my colleague at the Law School who specializes in patent law and also innovation law policy more broadly and finally Jim Cooley who is an attorney and practice here in Silicon Valley and also the former deputy head of the world intellectual property associate organization excuse me so we got a bunch of things we're going to talk about but this is going to be a conversation both among the four panelists but also hopefully among the room at large so it would help to know a little bit about background how many people here are lawyers how many people here are engineers okay public policy social science okay so pretty big mix so we are gonna sort of do some we're going to talk about a variety of intellectual property issues and doctrines but we will not sort of presume a lot of of knowledge if we are slipping too far into legal jargon stop us and say I have no idea what you're talking about and please interfere please interrupt with with questions as we start out so I want to start out with with patent law the sort of fundamental it sort of first fundamental question is is AI patentable and I think that raises the question what what do we mean by that solely say you want to lead us off sure so just as a kind of background for those of you who don't know anything about patent law um I mean I think my view is that AI doesn't require a fundamental rethinking of patent law that there a basic patent criteria that's now wait to think exactly how these apply in the AI context including which aspects of AI were talking about but the basic requirements for getting a patent are that the invention has to be new compared to everything that has happened before but not just new but non-obvious so a leap from what has happened in the past looking at all prior publications and things that were being used in the world it also has to be what's called patentable subject matter so that means that you can't get a patent on something like the abstract idea of using AI to cataract categorise skin lesions but you could get a patent perhaps on a particular algorithm for doing that so we can't patent a abstract idea or a law of nature but can patents more specific things this is a area of law that's changing a lot right now so patent lawyers are fighting on exactly what that rule means and then you also have to disclose enough about your invention so that other people who are in this field are able to make and use the invention without undue experimentation but that doesn't mean that you have to know how your invention works or give a specific recipe for doing it including getting the the source code for an algorithm so undo experimentation can be quite a bit of experimentation figuring out how these apply to AI can be challenging and the US Patent and Trademark Office is wrestling with this right now they put out a request for comments in August for a list of questions related to AI inventions including asking about like what are the different aspects of AI that could be patented as they listed some specific aspects like the structure of the database in which the AI will be trained and will act the training of the algorithm on the data the algorithm itself the results of the AI invention through an automated process the policies are weights to be applied to the data that affects the outcome of the results but they also ask for other ideas about different aspects of AI that could be protected through patents they're also interested in issues of inventor ship who owns these that we'll get to later but the question is actually interested me most that they asked and that are things I've thought about in the compradors pect of my scholarship are the questions related to disclosure like what you have to disclose to get a patent on a AI invention and so they asked about whether the degree of unpredictability of certain AI systems and things like deep learning systems with hidden layers that evolved during the learning and training process changed the requirements for how much disclosure is necessary to get a patent in these areas and I think these disclosure problems are not that different from problems that the PAC system has wrestled with before including in context that might seem very different like biotechnology where in the 1970s there were a lot of biotech inventions evolving new microorganisms and things where it wasn't clear that just a written disclosure would be enough to allow other people to make it that you needed to have access to the materials in that context and then the international patent system dealt with this by saying that you could get a patent by making a deposit of biological materials and there was a treaty in 1977 to set out the requirements for a internationally recognized depository these the positive materials have to be made available to the public once they're the patent issues and it's not that expensive to deposit materials or to access them as a member of the public and the disclosure rules also changed in 1994 patents on genetic sequences where you have to if you're getting a patent related to the nucleic acid or protein sequences you had to disclose the sequence in a standardized electronic format to allow people to find that more easily we should deposit like I think currently there's a consensus that these disclosure rules are not working as well in the software context as they are in the biochemical context here in terms of limiting cotton scope or in terms of conveying technical knowledge to people in those fields a number of people have suggested that software patents should be required to disclose more including disclosing the source code itself I think it probably is a non-starter politically but might be a good idea as a policy matter to require a disclosure and perhaps deposit of the electronic of the digital materials in a standardized product or depository the same way it is for biological ones seems to me the trade off of giving away some of the secret sauce and is really great we'll just keep it behind the scenes anyway so I mean I think this is I think this is gonna be a substantial a significant issue right and I think we'll talk about we do want to talk about trade secret questions I mean the kind of lay person answer to

Thanks Mauro your participation is very much appreciated
- Raelene Yurkanin

About the author

Raelene Yurkanin

I've studied paleoanthropology at Elmhurst University in Elmhurst and I am an expert in philosophy of mind. I usually feel pleased. My previous job was amusement park & recreation attendants I held this position for 14 years, I love talking about swimming and lego building. Huge fan of Nathan Fillion I practice floor exercises and collect radio premiums.