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

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.

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.

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...