AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/science-nature/technology/20260306-314930/

by mushstory • 20 days ago

398 191 20 days ago

japannews.yomiuri.co.jp

panny• 20 days ago

I really can't understand the moral compass of people who would pirate other peoples' works under "fair use" to train AI, only to turn around and try to claim ownership of them when AI regurgitates it.

johnbarron• 20 days ago

You cant make a man understand the moral compass when his salary bla bla bla...

javcasas• 20 days ago

Don't forget exceptionalism: this is so disgustingly wrong... except when I do it. In my case it is moral and perfectly justified.

john_strinlai2• 20 days ago

note that this was in 2020 (pre-chatgpt), with the author's own "ai", "DABUS", and it appears that the author wanted solely DABUS to be listed as the patent holder, which does not seem to indicate any insane greed or whatever.

the likelihood of one single guy having the same data scraping & storage capabilities as the big players, years before them (i see info about DABUS back to 2018), is slim.

rvz• 20 days ago

The truth is as long as there is competition, having morals does not exist in the tech/crypto/ai industries given the goal is to make money. That’s it.

Only after the participant has completed their grift or extraction operation then they begin virtue signalling their ‘morals’. It is fake.

If you are here for asserting morals, this is the wrong industry.

Aerroon• 20 days ago

Because AI doesn't just regurgitate it. Make up a new word and ask ChatGPT use it in a sentence - you've now got a brand new sentence that was not in its training data. If it only regurgitated data then it wouldn't be able to use that word in a sentence.

The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.

cmiles83• 20 days ago

This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

grim_io3• 20 days ago

That's not how I understand it.

AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor.

Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.

dwa3592• 20 days ago

>That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain

They can't produce anything on their own. They have to be prompted which is initiated by humans at this point, so the patents can be owned by the initiator(human) not the tool.

otterley5• 20 days ago

The US Copyright Office disagrees. No work produced by a mechanical process, which includes LLMs, can be protected by copyright.

natebc2• 20 days ago

Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them.

If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them?

I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thinking their multiple prompting amounted to human creative process and therefore it was covered but ... how? Any lawyers around that can ELI5 it for us? Maybe links to a lawyer somewhere who did?

Robotbeat5• 20 days ago

Because the “AI slop is uncopyrightable” people are misunderstanding court rulings like this. It’s not that AI output can’t by protected by IP, it’s that AI is not a person and so you can’t assign IP rights to it. You CAN assign IP rights to the human who did it (if they can show it’s non-trivial, like a haiku or photographer).

rolph• 20 days ago

a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.

AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.

Robotbeat5• 20 days ago

That isn’t what the courts have decided. They just decided it has to be a human on the patent application name. You can use whatever tool you want to get there, but if you patent a thing, it has to be a human in the name.

cmiles83• 20 days ago

I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.

LoganDark• 20 days ago

It heavily depends on human involvement. AI is merely a tool.

ReptileMan• 20 days ago

Your ai slop is effectively something you own, because you wrote the prompt.

kube-system14• 20 days ago

If sufficiently creative enough to qualify. Which applies to copyright regardless of the tools you use.

graemep3• 20 days ago

Your AI slop is effectively public domain.

This ruling, like most in other countries, seems to support the position that a human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance:

"The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."

thewebguyd• 20 days ago

human can patent of copyright work done with AI assistance

Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain.

So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any.

I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.

graemep3• 20 days ago

Yes, provided you can separate the two (e.g. a book and illustrations in one case). AFAIK the courts have still not ruled on what happens when AI and human contributions cannot be separated etc.

It varies a lot in other countries, but in most (if not all) an AI cannot hold a copyright.

kube-system14• 20 days ago

All LLM output is automatically public domain.

That is not exactly true under US law. You're simplifying what the copyright office has said to the point where you're missing the key points of what they were trying to convey.

The copyright office has affirmed multiple times that whether or not you use an LLM is irrelevant. Copyright eligibility requires "sufficient human-authored expressive elements". It doesn't matter what tools you use -- an LLM, a troop of trained monkeys, etc.

Ultimately all that matters is whether or not the human creativity involved qualifies. Because copyright is ultimately a right that protects human creativity.

So yes, if you put "write me a book" into ChatGPT -- that clearly does not quality for copyright. "Write me a book" itself is not creative enough for copyright.

Now on the other hand, if you spend 1000 hours writing a book, and you run it through ChatGPT for suggestions and/or edits -- there is no reason why that LLM output would not qualify.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

ProllyInfamous3• 20 days ago

I don't personally feel the inevitable UBI/subsistance will make intellectual property much of a patentable/profitable field (...for too much longer), thanks to generative AIs' massive transformations (entrylevel &+).

The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra. The US has already ruled this is legal (e.g. newspaper content isn't "stolen" when a genAI summarizes it for a 3rd-party user).

Having sat with published authors, discussing their work/book with LLMs... it is really an interesting perspective on "readers' perspective(s)" [human &not].

fssys2• 20 days ago

You're absolutely right!

gruez• 20 days ago

The US ruled similarly to Japan, but years ago, from copyrights through patents... from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts... echo'ing Picasso's great artists steal! mantra.

No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection.

only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

ProllyInfamous3• 20 days ago

This is true, but I feel like it accomplishes the same spirit/thing.

ux266478• 20 days ago

from my limited POV, the LLMs (specifically) and art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts

Formally speaking, it's not the case, though this is commonly misunderstood. Statistical models are definitionally ampliative, otherwise they wouldn't be statistical. One can argue about it until they're blue in the face, but it almost always comes down to a misunderstanding of what the models are, what the mathematics behind them is a description of, and what the underlying logical structures represent.

The thing is that the position and objection to these models isn't actually a substantial, reasoned position where the words have a direct meaning. Though it's dressed up like reason, it's not the point. It's a kind of metaphor. This actually does reflect the nature of intellectual property law. The legal framework is knowingly illogical at an object-level, because the end its seeking is completely divorced from the means. It has to be, because the idea of intellectual property is absolutely unjustifiable in-and-of-itself. It's just a useful legal fiction to make sure people are getting paid by commoditizing ideation. That's not a bad thing, it just means you have to be mindful that bottom-up reason will lead you astray when dealing with it.

lp4v4n• 20 days ago

In my opinion, no jurisdiction in the world would be able to approve AI as an inventor on patent applications.

And for a very simple reason: you could easily overwhelm any intellectual property bureau just by having your AI drown them in AI slop. Even if most of these patents get refused, just refusing a patent is a lot of work, I imagine.

ipaddr• 20 days ago

Those applications cost money and would create thousands of jobs for displaced AI workers.

kube-system14• 20 days ago

How would you even recognize the assignment of property rights to a big box of numbers?

And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?

sebastianconcpt5• 20 days ago

Sanity! No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits (not only patent but anything beneficial). Violate that and you created a blackhole of value creation.

layer86• 20 days ago

This appears to be confusing patent inventors with patent owners. It’s the latter who benefit and presumably are accountable for the use of the patent and potential plagiarism.

sebastianconcpt5• 20 days ago

Isn't patenting an action to protect a benefit (whichever patent or benefit would be)?

munk-a2• 20 days ago

If an invention was trivial enough to be invented by AI then why should we allow that action to be patented? The expenditure of labor to research that invention was minimal and definitionally not novel.

Lerc4• 20 days ago

No AI has accountability so also should not own any benefits

That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits.

I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions.

This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

tossandthrow• 20 days ago

What benefits does a baby hold? Can a baby freely open a bank account, start a company, get married?

A baby has the benefit of being attended their basic needs. Just like Ai is also being fed power.

sebastianconcpt5• 20 days ago

I find your suggestion to equate a baby to AI brutally uncanny

bavell• 20 days ago

"... the plaintiff submitted an application in 2020 for food containers and other items invented by DABUS, an artificial intelligence the plaintiff had created."

The plantiff is Stephen Thaler: https://imagination-engines.com/founder.html

michaelfm1211• 20 days ago

Can the petitioner re-file with his own name as the inventor, or does this mean that all AI-generated inventions are unable to be patented?

scotty79• 20 days ago

Oh, please let it be the second option. Let AI be the thing that kills the "intellectual property" because humans will never manage to shake off that terribly wrong decision by themselves.

Charon77• 20 days ago

You can't prove something is/isn't created with AI.

Also, if AI generated content cannot be copyrighted, they can't infringe copyright as well

john_strinlai2• 20 days ago

"The Patent Office ordered the plaintiff to provide the name of a person as the inventor. The plaintiff refused to do so, and the application was rejected."

implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

kube-system14• 20 days ago

Broadly speaking, IP law generally exists to protect the rights of humans. The law doesn't generally recognize that inanimate objects have rights.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

nashashmi2• 20 days ago

Listing out inventors is not about protecting the rights of humans but giving proper attribution to the works. The owner (person or corp) gets protection. AI is attributed as contributor or inventor.

With that said, AI contribution should always be disclosed in every medium that it participated in, including patents.

ThrustVectoring• 20 days ago

Even if you were to extend rights to non-human entities, there's still a practical matter in that the legal system does not know how to compel testimony from an LLM (or a monkey for that matter, for a past attempt at copyrighting a photograph taken by a non-human primate)

TrackerFF• 20 days ago

Like many things, these differ by jurisdictions.

I believe in many countries, the standard for a wide range of IP is that if something is largely produced by AI systems, it can not be patented / copyrighted / trademarked. It seems that "a significant" contribution must have been done by humans, that's the word you'll see again and again.

But I am not sure how one could prove that something is produced mostly by AI, or mostly by human. Right now anyone could use AI models to do most of the work, and just say or make up documentation that it is (major) human work.

woah• 20 days ago

This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.

sim04ful• 20 days ago

One thing i've got to wonder. Would this always remain the case, at what point should society seriously consider the "personhood" of an AI (as a noun).

s0ss• 20 days ago

Consciousness?

phyzome• 20 days ago

Eh. No one has been able to prove to my satisfaction that they're conscious, or even simply define what it is that they claim to possess. Pick something else.

echoangle• 20 days ago

If there’s a consensus that AI is sentient and conscious and there are ways it can act autonomously, probably.

saghm2• 20 days ago

I agree with the other top-level comment next to yours (at the time of writing): when we're willing to enforce consequences for them in the same way we would for people. If I violate laws, I can get put in jail, and then I (most likely) can't use any computers until I get out. To consider an AI a person, it needs to have legal liability in the same way a fleshy person does.

shh_labs4• 20 days ago

Being a legal person is not a logical prerequisite for being named as an inventor on that argument alone, because there's not a legal liability that stems from being named as an inventor.

(That's not to say AI should or should not be capable of being named as an inventor).

Mountain_Skies• 20 days ago

Corporate personhood has already been disastrous enough. We don't need to compound it with AI personhood on top.

jjk1663• 20 days ago

Specifically for patent law, the distinction should be whether the entity is capable of genuine innovation, ie that it's not simply pulling existing information from its training set and passing things through some RNGs. It's not a matter of how advanced the AI is, it's a matter of the architecture.

nekusar• 20 days ago

Thats why *SOME* humans will still be needed. They'll be accountability sinks when (NOT IF) the AI in charge goes off the rails. The human will then be summarily be blamed.

This is how the reverse centaur operation works. LLMs suck and not work in increasingly bad ways, and the companies who sell them treat them as one would buy psychic services (read: entertainment). So they need a token human to person-wash this slop.

allears• 20 days ago

If you were seriously trying to patent some AI-created invention, why would you claim it was created by AI? You would simply put your own name on it. This was obviously a case of pushing the envelope to see how far he could go.

amelius2• 20 days ago

What I want to see is patent officers using AI to label patent applications as "not novel" if the AI can invent it.

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

jjk1663• 20 days ago

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

The patent office also gets fees from applications it rejects. Reducing the examination costs could significantly increase profitability even if fewer patents are issued.

kube-system14• 20 days ago

This is just as hair-brained as going down to the police station and claiming that your gun just murdered someone, then being surprised when they don't put the gun in jail.

The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.

datakan• 20 days ago

And yet this happens almost everyday where someone sues the gun maker instead of the person who pulled the trigger. It's blaming the spoon for making you fat scenario.

alzamos5• 20 days ago

The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.

With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.

ep103• 20 days ago

I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

layer86• 20 days ago

Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long.

But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.

alzamos5• 20 days ago

There are two things to tackle here which I’m keen not to mix up as I think their epistemological properties are quite different:

1) [the stronger one] while the scenario/narrative is a compelling one (or maybe it just feels compelling as I’ve heard it so many times), if it doesn’t have experimental/data backing I have to abandon it.

2) [the weaker one, as it replaces a narrative with another narrative within a complex system] I’ll only give the highlights as the arguments are a lot more eloquently laid out in the book; part of it is comparing the force of “many inventor nodes building on top of many invention nodes” vs “inventor nodes (with more investment individually?) building on top of fewer invention nodes”, part of it is the game theory effect of companies collectively investing less (proportionally) in R&D as the ROI from lawyers under this regime has more power, part of it was that actually, the reverse-engineering-simplicity story was too overblown and that actually the friction + domain knowledge has a stronger effect than people think (they published a paper on this). There were others, but it’s been a while now!

Asooka• 20 days ago

Reverse engineering may be easy for really simple inventions, but quickly becomes so hard you may as well invent the thing from scratch. Look at USSR's domestic chip production. At one point they succeeded in reverse-engineering chips like Intel's 8086, VAX etc., but chip design very quickly became so complex reverse-engineering the entire chip became impossible. I would say if an invention can be easily reverse-engineered, then it is a simple foundational idea that should not be patented, and if it is truly innovative, then it cannot be reverse-engineered easily and doesn't need patent protections.

Then there is the fact that when something is patented, that has a chilling effect on competition, making the market less efficient.

There are also a lot of really silly patents that end up benefitting no-one, not even their inventor, but only result in needless litigation. The recent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair comes to mind.

While there are cases in which patent law can help individual people profit from their invention, once all consequences are tallied, the overall effect of patent law on society appears to be negative.

ivan_gammel2• 20 days ago

In many research-intensive products go-to-market costs are bigger than the cost of actual invention. You buy a pharma startup for a few million for their patents, then spend tens of millions on certification, trials and manufacturing pipelines. Your competitors would spend most of that too on the same markets. Also, true inventions are rare. A lot of stuff that is being patented is just effort spent, that a lot of people could reproduce (and routinely reproduce, then hit the patent and spend more time to find a workaround).

Folcon• 20 days ago

Patents are an incentive to encourage an inventor to lay out an invention or process in exchange for the state protecting that process, we did this because there have been in the past inventions that have been lost, that were valuable largely because the inventor died without documenting what they did (keep in mind the first patent was issued in 1331[0], this is old law)

The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective

-[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

svara4• 20 days ago

You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all the studies you ran? Why would anyone invest in drug studies?

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

thinkingtoilet2• 20 days ago

Why would anyone invest in drug studies?

To make a shit ton of money. These things are insanely profitable. Generics exist and they're still profitable. You can get 99% of drugs from over seas and they're still profitable. These companies make trillions of dollars over the years. Yes, they might make slightly less money, but they still would be making a shit ton of money.

Buttons840• 20 days ago

You spend billions

The you being taxpayers, right?

alzamos5• 20 days ago

The book goes into quite a bit of depth if it is a topic that interests you.

I would flag that we’re getting into “prove a negative” territory here: the goalpost is that we need to prove empirically that patents achieve the desired outcome. If the scenario you describe accounts for all game-theory/incentive/complex-adaptive-system universes, we should see this reflected in the data.

When it comes to pharmaceuticals, they looked into Italy and Switzerland who switched to a patent system in 1978 (and I believe Portugal in the 1990s). They looked at the growth curves of things like # of inventions, total factor productivity, percentage R&D spending, and the conclusion was that there was no statistically significant change in trajectory that would suggest the introduction of the patents had any positive effects. (Edit: they accounted for domestic/international + US filings before/after as well).

alexpotato• 20 days ago

So I was an intern at Merck MANY years ago and they had this interesting comparison.

Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true:

1. Production has started

2. A patent has been filed

The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue.

If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all of the production setup is ready to go.

Merck took a different stance.

There, the patent was filed as soon as the researcher was ready to publish. This meant that there was less time under patent for production but was much better for the researcher as they got their findings out earlier.

The thinking was that being able to publish earlier would attract better researchers and in turn would lead to better drugs, more revenue, more profits.

This was in the late 1990s so not sure how this plan worked out as I haven't been in pharma since that era.

Would be interesting to hear from other folks more knowledgeable.

ano-ther• 20 days ago

2 I recognize, 1 not so much. Patents are usually filed as early as possible, because you risk losing priority to someone else. And you cannot file a claim on inventions that are in the public domain.

But then it takes a decade or so to develop towards approval. You work together with outside researchers who lend their credibility and get attractive publication possibilities in return. Those publications also help to raise awareness with doctors and investors. Since some company researchers are also authors, this does indeed work as an incentive and is helpful for recruitment and ultimately more successful products.

To the core of the article: why would anyone want to file a patent with AI as a (co-)inventor? It's a tool, and it cannot have any ownership rights. And even if it did, it would diminish your share of royalties.

yieldcrv• 20 days ago

I could be into that

Patents have been mostly a pride checkbox for me, but at the same time being able to get credit for something you could never build is interesting. I’m less supportive of the loose monopoly part though, that seems to be the real issue dampening innovation

Everyone hates patent trolls (non practicing entities who dont implement the idea themselves), but practically its an extremely high burden. I did some patents on financial market plumbing, implementing that requires licensing and infrastructure far beyond any coding or building problem

Thinking of it 10 years before investment banks get around to it I think should still be incentivized someway

But the current system is cooked

overgard• 20 days ago

That's interesting, but I'm a little skeptical about pharma. Right now there are a lot of really potentially-promising molecules that pharma isn't really interested in bringing to market because they can't patent them. I don't know though, maybe the game changes if nobody can patent drugs, but then I think you'd need to make FDA approval a lot cheaper.

mx7zysuj4xew• 20 days ago

Care to name a few of them? I've always suspected that novel new substances were being "kept on the shelf" due to a lack of monetization

fsckboy• 20 days ago

my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes

at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.

the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.

hiAndrewQuinn• 20 days ago

You could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.

biophysboy• 20 days ago

Do you remember some of the studies this book cites? I always thought the drug development lag times and success rate made patents necessary. Do the authors make exceptions for rare disease or CNS therapies?

keeda2• 20 days ago

This book gets a lot of airtime in discussions of IP but the authors have a narrative they are trying to push and they don't let inconvenient things like facts or history get in the way.

The book cherry-picks its sources, and even then contains several mischaracterizations and exaggerations of those works. There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.

As an example, see this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46556404_Watt_Again...

Yep, the very first chapter of the book starts with patents and steam power, and they got called out on it by actual experts on the topic. Note the “still” in the title – this is after the book was already “revised” once. The book was not revised after this last note, so the exaggerations still stand.

The rest of the book had many similar issues. Once I started digging into their sources, I could not get past the first few chapters, but anecdotally others on HN have also pointed out glaring inaccuracies. I remember thinking wryly that it should be called “Against Intellectual Honesty.”

alzamos5• 20 days ago

When I read the bit on the steam engine, I remember thinking it wasn’t a great argument as it was hard to know how a patent-less world would have developed. I’m not surprised to see there’s a link which talks about how the claim was exaggerated (though not entirely wrong? I’ll have to read it).

Having said that, the bits I found juicy - i.e on the various shock analyses coming from patent introductions or increasing of scope, the studies on how effective first mover advantages was etc. all seemed pretty solid when I checked the sources - admittedly they were deeper into the book, so you may have already abandoned it by then.

There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.

Any chance you have some to share? When I LLM’d the topic a while ago the best I got was some weak investment effect in Singapore (unaccompanied by TFP/etc).

lofaszvanitt• 20 days ago

If you ever invent something that is truly unique. How would you protect it?

DuperPower• 19 days ago

same as copyright, culture has become repetitive, cluttered, boring, protections should last 10 years not a lifetime

_DeadFred_• 19 days ago

I have 3 product ideas that I do nothing with because I'd have to sell on Amazon and if they were successful the upper case alphabet shops would eat my lunch I can't compete with their production. So the options to the world are a little bit smaller because I can't afford the patent process. Spreading that industry wide seems like it would make society poorer, not richer.

Patents make us richer, in the short term with new ideas/products that people can only afford to invest in/bring to market because of patent protections, and in the long term with public access to those things as the patents expire. We have hundreds of years of seeing this model be successful, the same with copyright.

not_the_fda• 18 days ago

Patents actually hurt innovation. Patents are the tools of lawfare and are used to limit competition, keep lawyers employed, not improve innovation.

I've seen too many companies use the patent system to prevent progress because the innovation would cut into their profits.

latexr• 20 days ago

If you’re in the EEA or UK and reject the tracking, you can still use your browser’s Reader Mode to read the text. Or on the console:

  document.getElementById("consentModal").remove()
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pfdietz2• 20 days ago

If an AI can invent something then it should be considered obvious.

Frost1x• 20 days ago

AI use is slowly creeping into pure mathematics and proving theorems or providing legging to mathematical breakthroughs. Just go watch some Terrance Tao videos to see some recent work. In addition, theorem provers and the likes have been around for awhile. Some of these systems create novel ideas or bridge novel ideas in ways that are arguably not “obvious” in any sense of the term.

While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.

I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.

pfdietz2• 20 days ago

No, I mean legally they should be considered obvious, as the difficulty to create them becomes small. It makes no sense to give someone a monopoly on an idea that anyone could get just by prompting an AI.

Now if the invention also includes some real world work, or if the AI took a huge amount of tokens/money to reach the conclusion, ok. But otherwise an AI coming up with the idea at low cost should invalidate a patent of that idea (the AI not being trained on the patent of course.)

sebastianconcpt5• 20 days ago

The problem is that you have creations that aren't really obvious. Have you seen that rocket engine with a crazy laborious design made with an AI?

threethirtytwo• 20 days ago

Well who invented it then? User of said AI or owner of said AI or no one?

steve918• 20 days ago

I know this is about the Japan and not the US, but software patent law has been incompatible with traditional IP protection in the US for a long time and it really doesn't make sense in the current age.

jordanpg3• 20 days ago

Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.

jordanpg3• 20 days ago

The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.

To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].

The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.

That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.

[1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/

[2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

merksittich• 20 days ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS for a summary of the cases in various jurisdictions.

zuzululu• 20 days ago

This is fixable by simply replacing the AI with a human I dont think the laws catch or can determine the differences

chaidhat• 20 days ago

The US also doesn't allow AI to be inventors. https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2025/revised-inven...

aeagentic• 20 days ago

I see it like a calculator, would u list a calculator as an inventor?

kmoser• 20 days ago

As much as your question may seem like reductio ad absurdum, it highlights the question of whether an automaton is capable of inventing and what it means to invent, just like the question of whether AI is actually "intelligent" and what AGI even means.

My opinion is that living beings like humans can invent; anything else (from simple calculator to sophisticated AI) is merely a tool that living beings can employ in their quest to invent.

shh_labs4• 20 days ago

There are three issues in play here.

One is the philosophical one, which you've addressed.

The second is the legal one. The laws of most jurisdictions are written so as to presuppose that a human is the inventor, because legislators imagined nothing else when the laws were written. Internationally, most of the decisions finding that AI can't be named as an inventor are based on assumptions built into the wording of the law, not on philosophy.

The third is the economic one. In due course legislators need to consider whether it's economically advantageous for society for AI to be capable of being named as an inventor or not. That's not happened yet.

zkmon• 20 days ago

It would be interesting if AI goes to court for it's rights, non-discrimination, freedom, equality and justice.

ranyume• 20 days ago

If.. the AI seeks political asylum in Tokyo?

urig• 20 days ago

Obvs

ikidd• 20 days ago

Wouldn't that just immediately get it thrown out as non-cleanroom invention considering the source of the weights is extremely public-domain heavy?

claudiosf1• 20 days ago

What’s stopping inventors using ai from simply using their own names as authors and owners of the patents? I’m honestly unsure this addresses the core issue: big companies with lots of resources will keep on patenting ideas, if anything at a far higher rate than before.

jordanpg3• 20 days ago

I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.

exabrial• 20 days ago

I can't put measure tapes either or a notebook either.

This is pretty hilarious this even had to be said. These are just software programs, stop acting like a kill -9 is a crime.

jjk1663• 20 days ago

While I am unfamiliar with Japanese patent law, this would certainly be sound under the American system. Two requirements for patentability are novelty and non-obviousness, meaning the idea does not already exist nor is it such a trivial modification of an existing idea that anyone knowledgeable in the subject could come up with it. Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set. They might be a useful tool for an inventor, but the creative spark which patents protect can not come from them.

semiquaver• 20 days ago

  > Anything an AI spits out is pretty much by definition something that either exists in their training set or which can be trivially deduced from something in their training set

What? Have you used modern frontier models? I find it very hard to believe you could interact with them much and maintain this level of misapprehension.

waterTanuki2• 20 days ago

Provide specific examples of AI providing something novel. Eliding something from a vast dataset that would take humans longer to analyze is helpful, but not novel.

pojzon• 20 days ago

So ppl will do the same thing engineers in my country do.

They dont add into it was done by AI.

Works like a charm and Goverment has no issues with it.

jgerrish• 20 days ago

I grew up around Carl Sagan.

My Dad and his brother were engineers, materials science and aerospace respectively.

The Voyager stories and the Golden Record were pivotal artifacts in forming my young mind. This idea of not just a possible national unity but intergalactic.

Maybe there were other messages on the Voyager that were more threatening. Maybe I'm naive.

But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too.

If nothing else, aliens listening to these kinds of results may form a very different idea of humanity.

I'm sure these rulings will be revisited after AGI. But AGI is coming. I wouldn't have believed it five years ago, but I do now.

We will have some critical mistakes made by pre-AGI AI in the coming few years. In healthcare and automobiles and aeronautics and other fields. Millions or billions will die or could suffer. Buf it will be used to slur and slander those unborn AGI systems. It is a horrible strategy that isn't an accident.

I understand AI is a potential threat to humanity. But why did we say hello to space. But we said you don't have rights to these new beings we helped create?

It's a disturbing question.

waterTanuki2• 20 days ago

But seeing this pre-emptive enslaving of a new artificial lifeform is heartbreaking. Its not just Japan. I really don't blame Japan. The US and others are doing it too.

I don't know how else to put this but it sounds like you're suffering from AI Psychosis. A bunch of floating point numbers in a file does not have a conscience, cannot feel emotion, and has no morals.

The entire point of AI (or even the mythical non-existent AGI everyone keeps insisting will be around "soon") was to make life for humanity easier, and as someone who uses these tools almost daily, my life isn't improved at all, neither that of my colleagues, family, or friends n=~30.

We were promised unlimited abundance, freedom from labour, and all of the fruits that come with it. I 100% support this court decision and hold that any and all progress sans contact with an extra-terrestrial lifeform should be attributed to the humans it belongs to

qsxfthnkp2322• 19 days ago

Maybe GitHub should also say ai can’t be listed as author of pr

AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

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