According to the Federal Court of Justice, a patent application from October 2019, in which an AI must be registered as the inventor, is not admissible in its original form. The patent application was intended to protect beverage or food containers with fractal profiles. On the patent application form at the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) in Munich, Dabus (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentences) was recorded as the inventor – not a human being.
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The DPMA then rejected the entry as inadmissible, and the American AI researcher Stephen L. Thaler, who is behind Dabus, filed a complaint against it. Alternatively, he wanted to file that either an address for Dabus be given to him as a natural person, he be entered as an inventor and Dabus still be named as the inventor, or his name be entered as an inventor but with the addition that he causes the invention of AI.
Humanitarian contribution is important
The first two variants did not convince the tenth Civil Senate of the BGH. Rather, according to the decision, what is decisive for the status as an inventor in a technical principle discovered with the help of an artificial intelligence system is a human contribution that has had a significant impact on the overall success. The lawyer involved in the proceedings has already published on LinkedIn As it stands, this is not a problem because, according to the current state of scientific knowledge, there is no system “that discovers technical lessons without any human preparation or influence.”
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What is decisive for the status of an inventor, from which his rights under the Patent Act derive, is that a natural person has had a significant influence on the intended application for a patent. However, it is permissible to add the requested name to Thaler, who used AI in the invention: According to the BGH, this is legally irrelevant, and “can be easily separated from the name of the inventor and can be ignored for the collection and processing of data remains.”
Dabus operator Stephen L. Thaler, an inventive man from a patent law perspective, has been trying to get AI registered as an inventor worldwide for years – and has so far failed almost universally.
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