EPO rejects ‘AI inventor’ patent applications

Late last week, the European Patent Office (EPO) refused two patent applications that list an artificial intelligence (AI) application as the sole inventor.

After hearing the arguments of the applicant, the EPO refused the European patent applications as they don’t meet the requirement that an inventor designated in the application has to be a human being, not a machine.

Dabus, the AI application that is named as inventor on both of the patents, is said to have designed a type of plastic food container and a flashing beacon light.

In August, WIPR reported that a team of researchers at the University of Surrey in the UK filed patent applications in Europe, the UK and the US.

Ryan Abbott, professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey, led the team behind the patent applications in a bid to “raise awareness and effect change” in patent law.

It seems that the EPO didn’t think that the inventor of the AI Stephen Thaler’s had demonstrated how he had acquired the rights to the applications from Dabus.

Thaler initially indicated that he derived the rights to the invention from the AI inventor as the AI's employer, according to a preliminary opinion from the EPO.

However, the EPO didn’t accept this and so Thaler subsequently claimed that he was the successor in title.

The EPO stated: “Machines do not have legal personality and cannot own property. Accordingly, a machine cannot have a family name and given names, as required for designating an inventor by rule 19(1) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). Moreover, a machine cannot own rights to an invention and cannot transfer them within a employment relationship ... or by succession.”

In the oral arguments, held on Friday, December 20, the applicant argued that accepting AI systems as inventors would allow applicants to indicate the truthful inventor and that the EPC doesn’t specify that the inventor must be human.

But, in deciding to refuse the applications, the EPO concluded that the designations of inventor don’t meet the requirements set out by the EPC.

The EPO will publish a reasoned decision in January 2020.