Patenting Your Computer's Inventions

daghlian writes "Here's a New York Times article (insert free registration comment here) about what to do patentwise when intelligent systems come up with patentable ideas. Interesting quote, in the context of the recent (and justified, IMO) kvetching here, is this: 'A patent is denied when an invention is obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art....'" But what if the 'person' to whom an invention is obvious is silicon-based? Things at the USPTO could get even screwier than they are today.

Comments

Concern for Liability

[debrain]

Sure, silicon can take credit for new ideas and inventions and great advances in our children's understanding of reality. That's fine with me. That doesn't concern me at all. I don't care who or what patents anything, so long as my personal abilities are not intervened on.

When automated drivers start crashing into me on the highway I start looking for liability. And if that automated driver was a self-contained, autonomous being that is otherwise incapable of making a sensible rebuttle in court, what am I to do then? Do I sue the makers? That's like suing parents -- it just doesn't hold for something legally declared a being. But can we punish something that has no real regrets. Cannot sentients decide to kill without us knowing, obviated from liability by the nature of their ability to clone in an electronic existence. And as punishment, should we just switch the power off, that doesn't satiate me very much if I've just lost my family in a car accident to an artificial being. If the sentient was incapable to save lives, I can forgive. If a true sentient is unwilling to preserve life, how am I to correct it?

The ability of our artificial children to procreate, evolve, patent ideas, explore space, or serve up new fancy types of porn, doesn't concern me. My primary concerns are with the liability of sentient artificial entities, as the punishment and recuperate is as likely to work on artificial beings as it is on humans. Throw them in jail with a bunch of other sentients so they learn how not to get caught.

It's safe to presume that anything that can be legally declared intelligent will, on average, be by definition smarter than the vast majority of the human population. How are we to adapt to sentients other than ourselves, that will be created to be intelligent (rather than bred for jollies)?

Chess and patents

[sreeram]

I have always wondered about Chess players patenting some of their moves. To me, it appears that they could satisfy all the requirements for patentability.

(1) Occasionally, a brilliant GM might discover a move that has never been documented before - qualifies as having no prior art.

(2) The move might be sophisticated enough that it is not obvious to a lot of good Chess players, let alone the commoners - qualifies as being non-obvious.

(3) The move is after all a process, a design - qualifies for a "method" patent.

So, what happens then? You can't ever play that move unless you license it? Whoa.

I was thinking about that supposedly remarkable move that Deep Blue played against Kasparov in Game Four of their rematch - which even Kasparov admitted showed signs of the machine's "intelligence". Would IBM have been able to patent it (if they had applied for one before someone documented the game)?

Sreeram.

A Computer's Rights

[retep]

Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer. If someone gains great help in creating their invention by their toolset the toolset isn't going to be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Likewise the computer will never be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Computers don't yet have any rights so they therefor can't own anything or own any patents.

As for liability as far as I know the liability rests with the person manufacturing the product. Not even the patent owner. Let alone the tool that made it.

A good area for the GPL

[paxx]

Here's a good application for the GPL. We already see it applied profusely to software, and books are beginning a tentative move into the realm of the free license as seen in an earlier article and mentioned several subsequent comments. Since the computer is a machine developed over many years by many different people, it seems to me that no one should really own the work they do. Therefore, the work should be "owned" by the community.

Not only would this solve the problem of patent infringement, it would allow needed improvements to be made and implemented by anyone who wished to do so. Any improvements suggested can be used by the manufacturers of GPL'd products, similar to the updates to the linux kernel given by various companies selling distributions of the program.

Re:a problem for the year 3000

[jbuhler]

> judging from the current state of artificial
> intelligence, i don't see a computer coming up
> with an patentable idea any time soon.

I beg to differ.

I once TA'd for an AI professor at Rice U. who worked on automated synthesis of mechanical systems. She did a project with Xerox to design more effective mechano-optical systems for copiers (i.e. the lens/mirror arrangements that get the page image to the reproduction engine). Her software rapidly rediscovered the mechanisms used in all Xerox copiers at the time, then went on to design better ones.

A paper describing the theory behind the software is available at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika/red.ps.gz

The original intent of the patent system

[Gurlia]

Seems that the existing patent system is becoming more and more irrelevent (or hard to apply) in today's fast-advancing technology... However, I like it that the article pointed out the original intention of the patent system:

The patent system itself, conceived to reward human innovation with a limited monopoly, will eventually have to be modified, Dr. Pollack said.

Absolutely so. We have seen many examples of how the current patent system just fails to achieve this goal: ie. to give a limited reward to human innovation. Although it has worked before, it's starting to show signs of becoming decrepit. We've had problems with people abusing the system by patenting, eg., a well-known algorithm, and having the patent go through because of incompetence/ignorance of the people at the patent office. And now we have "inventions" made by computer algorithms, which seems to be a monkey wrench thrown into the patent system.

Rather than try to patch up the patent system and keep it going, perhaps it's time to reconsider the original goals of the patent system. The original goal was to reward the human inventor for his invention. I guess the bottom line is, of what form should this reward be? Under the existing patent system, it is to give the inventor exclusive rights to his invention for a certain period of time, and to give him the authority to allow/prohibit others' using of his invention. But is this still relevant today (and in the future)?

I'm thinking of the difference between the reward given to a patent owner and the reward given (or the gratification experienced) by an Open Source developer who is proud that he can share his ideas and have the community accept them. I don't know how applicable Open Source is to patents in general, but as far as software and software-related stuff is concerned, it seems that the "ego gratification" of developing an Open Source project does not suffer from the same shortcomings as the existing patent system.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

Re:The original intent of the patent system

[mmmmbeer]

"The patent system itself, conceived to reward human innovation with a limited monopoly..."

Actually, this isn't quite correct. In the US Constitution (I don't know the details in other countries, but I will assume similarity, for argument's sake), the phrase regarding patents and copyrights goes:

"Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for a limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

This implies not a reward so much as an incentive. A person is less likely to share their discoveries, or even go to the trouble of making advancements at all, if they cannot expect to get a certain amount of control over (and, yes, profit from) them.

Let me give an example. Let's say I'm a insomniac techie with too much spare time (entirely true). Now let's say that late at night some time I figure out a revolutionary new data storage method that would make all of today's storage obsolete. If I patent that idea, I can make a bundle, retire in luxury, be surrounded by beautiful women, all the latest geek toys, a Cray supercomputer... Sorry, I got distracted there. But the point is, of course I would patent this, and therefore share it with the world, and improve technology. On the other hand, let's say there are no patents. That means, as soon as I introduce this idea, all of the major data storage companies are going to start making them, too. Not only that, but they're going to be able to make them faster, cheaper, and in larger quantities than I possibly could. I'm not going to get anything from this, except maybe an occasional footnote in a magazine article. So I'm not going to tell anyone; I'm going to hang onto this idea until I can find a way to make money out of it (kind of selfish, maybe, but that's how many people/corporations are). And that might never happen, so this technology might be delayed until someone else develops it.

A good real-world example might be IBM, which (if I have my facts straight - I might be thinking of someone else) has a huge R&D budget, mostly for the purpose of getting patents. They don't use the technology they develop, but they develop it anyways so they can sell it to someone else. If they couldn't patent their discoveries, they wouldn't have any incentive to develop anything they aren't going to use themselves. That would definitely slow down technological evolution.

Although I agree that the patent system needs to be redesigned, but I think the purpose of patents is still clearly needed. I like the idea of GPL and Open Source philosophy, but you can't force it on people. Some people actually do this stuff for a living, and telling them "you should be proud of yourself" just won't feed them very well.

Man, I'm long-winded. Whew! :)

Who would own the patent?

[{R00T}]

It seems that the person that instructed the computer to work on a given problem would hold the patent. The person that put the computer on a task does not have to be the inventor of the software/hardware, nor whould the inventor, if it is not the person using the device, get the patent. It just seems to me that this is the most logical "solution".

I hate this sig, but im too lazy to change it.

new patent

[Bill Currie]

My computer has come up with a clever means of implementing basic intelligens in patent office officials. As there doesn't seem to be any prior art, I beleive I shouldn't have any problems applying for a patent on behalf of my computer.

Oh, wait a minute, I have to apply at the patent office, don't I? Hmm, could be a problem...