Source: cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com
The modern era of innovation and scientific growth has been largely led by the rise of the machine age. The successful incorporation of automation capabilities with basic human intelligence has resulted in what is termed as “Artificial Intelligence”. Artificial Intelligence is used in almost every field today ranging from automated vehicles, healthcare, aviation, finance, entertainment, education, heavy industries and so on. With each passing day, machines with higher and higher capabilities of learning and autonomous thinking are being conceived and implemented. AI has the potential to challenge the core standards that are edifice of Patent law. The granting of patent rights to AI-generated innovations would act as a catalyst for new and superior improvements which would be hard to obtain solely through human ingenuity.
India is rising as a new hotspot for patent filings in the field of Artificial Intelligence and is among the countries touching the apex of publications in specific classes such as computer imaginative and prescient and natural language processing. A recent World Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO) report briefs about how India has turned out to be one among the top 10 countries to file AI patents. According to the report, India was ranked eighth when it came to the “first-to-file” scurry in AI patent since 2015 and says that the country has witnessed excessive boom in this regard in the previous years.Machine learning being the dominant subset of AI, covers one-third of all recognized inventions (134,777 patent documents) in which desktop learning-related patent have grown yearly by 28 per cent, with 20,195 patent applications filed in 2016 (compared with 9,567 in 2013).One of the primary contributors from India and a top contender in the worldwide listing of AI patents has been IBM, with an impressive tally of 5,930 AI-related patents. According to current reports, IBM inventors from India have filed over 800 patents, ascending themselves as the second greatest contributor to the company’s overall patents in technologies ranging from AI to cloud computing. Also the year 2018, witnessed a 4.5 times inflation in filings in Natural language processing (NLP) domain. With the continued explosion of advances in artificial intelligence (in particular its technological cousin machine learning) and the evermore pervasive use of these approaches in consumer products in the recent years, it is of little surprise that the rate of patent filing and the number of grants in this field is increasing so rapidly.
The current patent law states that, someone, conventionally a natural person (in legal terms this refers to an individual human being, alternatively than one associated with a personal or public body) who merely applies the logic to make something manageable can’t be termed as an inventor.AI is giving machines the unique ability to inherent “creativity” and the competence to “think on their feet”, as a kind of computational creativity, If the above argument stands to reason, an equally compelling idea would be of, what AI machines can “invent”?
The idea that an AI machine could potentially conceive a patentable idea opens a whole gamut of possibilities as well as legal offshoots. Will an AI machine enjoy the same lawful protection as its human counterpart? Is the true inventor the AI machine or its creator? Will the existing patent laws be sufficient to accommodate this paradigm shift? Will a new set of laws be required? Can a machine truly be restricted to patent protection in defined geographical areas? Will this mean that AI machines will eventually be affiliated to countries as well? Can an AI machine also be an infringer? Will it enjoy royalties upon allowing a third party to commercialize its invention?These are the problems that may have to be addressed by state laws and by enterprises.
Although, the reality of a world where AI inventors go head-to-head with human inventors sounds astonishing and frightening, it seems to be the direction in which we are headed. If AI machines in the near future truly gain the insight required to devise patentable inventions, the existing patent laws need to do a whole lot of catching up. The patentability of software applications, which form the very molecular unit of these formidable computers, is still up for debate in the court of law. While it will possible take a very long time to truly address the full scope of Artificial Intelligence, the remarkable abilities these machines display everyday have definitely lodged the idea of a machine-led era of innovation in the intellectual sphere.
