Posts in Inventors Information

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced guidance for practitioners and the public regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the preparation of filings for submission to the Office. The guidance comes two months after the Office issued a guidance memorandum for the Trademark and Patent Trial and Appeal Boards (TTAB and PTAB) on the misuse of AI tools before the Boards that clarified the application of existing rules to AI submissions.

The remarkable story that inventor Alan Nelson shared last week at the 7th Annual Intellectual Property Awareness Summit held by CIPU at Northwestern University was revealing in many ways. Dr. Nelson related how he overcame numerous obstacles to commercialize a landmark technology for detecting cervical cancer in the 1990s. Using artificial intelligence (AI) while at the University of Washington, Dr. Nelson automated and vastly improved how early and accurately cervical cancer is identified — he and his team invented a machine to read Pap smears. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday affirmed a district court finding that two inventors should be added as co-inventors to a patent for a method of transporting gaseous fluids. The CAFC concluded that the record “does not leave us with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made” in finding the inventors contributed significantly to the invention.

On February 20, 2024, a Brazilian congress member, Antônio Luiz Rodrigues Mano Júnior (known as Júnior Mano), introduced a bill to amend the national IP Statute (Law #9,279/96) and regulate the ownership of inventions generated by artificial intelligence systems. Bill #303/2024 proposes the addition of a paragraph to Article 6 of the IP Statute, which regulates ownership of inventions, with the following wording: “in the case of inventions autonomously generated by artificial intelligence system, the patent can be requested in the name of the artificial intelligence system that has created the invention, being the artificial intelligence system considered the inventor and owner of rights arising from the invention.”

Writing a useful and enforceable patent application is not an easy task. A number of articles show how to draft a patent application. For example, Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog published a series of articles with tips to avoid mistakes or pitfalls. Automated software and AI-assisted drafting tools have also become available, but there have been ethical and practical concerns about relying on AI. Instead of discussing the specific details of the steps in writing a patent application or the pros and cons of automated or AI tools, I will focus on the overall strategies or approaches.

The year 2023 marked another year of rapid advancements in quantum computing technology, showcasing significant progress in key areas such as scalable quantum computing and quantum error correction. Multiple physical realization approaches or modalities for creating quantum bits (qubits) are under development, offering different tradeoffs in performance metrics such as qubit count, error rate, decoherence time, and gate speed. Patenting activities are effective indicators of innovation speed and resource distribution in a technology field. As 2024 begins, this post explores the newest development focus and trends in the quantum computing industry through the angle of its patent landscape and discusses strategic considerations for patenting in this rapidly evolving field.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released guidance for determining inventorship of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted inventions. As the Office has previously stated, the guidance clarifies that “while AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable, the inventorship analysis should focus on human contributions, as patents function to incentivize and reward human ingenuity.” The USPTO issued a call for comments on AI inventorship in February 2023. That Federal Register Notice (FRN) asked the public to respond to 11 questions, including “how does the use of an AI system [in the invention process]…differ from the use of other technical tools”; whether AI inventions may be patentable under current patent laws on joint inventorship by, for example, simply listing the natural person involved in inventions created by AI machines; and whether statutory or regulatory changes should be made to better address AI contributions to inventions.

The number of design applications filed through the Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs continues to grow, with an 18.8% increase in annual filings reported in 2022. The Hague system, which covers 96 countries, offers numerous advantages for applicants and presents some interesting strategic options for filing in the United States as well.

As reported on IPWatchdog, the UK Supreme court recently ruled that a trained neural network (an Artificial Intelligence known as DABUS) could not be listed as the inventor on two patent applications filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). As a result, the two applications were treated as withdrawn for failing to comply with the requirements of the UK Patents Act 1977. This not a surprising decision for reasons that will be set out below, and it is consistent both with the earlier UK court decisions, and with the decisions of other jurisdictions around the world where Dr. Thaler has argued his case. The decision has, however, sparked interest in the questions of artificial intelligence and its ability both to “autonomously” devise inventions and to subsequently own them.

Recent debates about AI patentability have focused on whether the outputs of an AI system, such as a neural network, can be patented. Such debates have been spurred not only by recent general advances in the power of AI but also by Dr. Stephen Thaler’s “Artificial Inventor” project’s attempts to obtain patents on devices generated using his neural network-based DABUS software. If you thought that whether an AI-generated output can be patented is a cutting-edge question, then consider whether an input to an AI system, such as a prompt to a large language model (LLM), can be patented.

The patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) tell the story of society’s innovative future. While the true value of a technological advance develops over time, the following selection of patents of 2023 represent meaningful advances in several emerging areas of technology. From artificial intelligence (AI) systems for retail checkout to improved mRNA drug delivery, these innovations have been chosen for their likeliness to make a significant real-world impact in 2024 and beyond.

Unsurprisingly, the UK Supreme Court today ruled that Stephen Thaler’s AI Machine, DABUS, cannot be granted patents for inventions it autonomously created. While the Court suggested that questions such as whether inventions like DABUS’ should be patentable and if the meaning of the term “inventor” should be expanded are important ones that should be considered at a policy level, the present case was concerned solely with the interpretation of the present law, which clearly does not contemplate non-human inventors.  

An event held Monday by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), and moderated by former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, featured a number of high-profile political and professional figures in the intellectual property space debating approaches to strengthening the U.S. patent system, with an emphasis on national security. Representative Deborah Ross (D-NC), who serves on the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet, first joined Iancu to discuss her reasons for supporting the Promoting and Respecting Economically Vital American Innovation Leadership (PREVAIL) Act.

Recently, Wen Xie argued on IPWatchdog that the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have reached different conclusions regarding “the creative and conceiving capabilities of machines,” which leads to intellectual property (IP) law being self-contradictory. According to Xie, the USCO presumes that artificial intelligence (AI) is creative, while the USPTO does not reach a similar conclusion regarding AI inventorship. I disagree.