Patenting the Output of Autonomously Inventive Machines

• Author: Ryan B. Abott
• Position: Ryan B. Abbott is a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey School of Law in the United Kingdom, and an adjunct assistant professor at David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be reached at r.abbott@surrey.ac.uk. This article is adapted from the author's article 'I Think, ...
• Pages: 18-24

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 1 , a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2017 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This

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A

n innovation revolution is on the horizon. Articial intel

ligence (AI) has been generating inventive output for

decades, and now the continued and exponential

growth in computing power is poised to take creative machines

from novelties to major drivers of economic growth. A creative

singularity in which computers overtake human inventors as

the primary source of new discoveries is foreseeable.

This phenomenon poses new challenges to the traditional

paradigm of patentability. Computers already are generating

patentable subject matter under circumstances in which the

computer, rather than a human inventor, meets the require-

ments to qualify as an inventor (a phenomenon I refer to as

“computational invention”).1 Yet, it is not clear that a computer

could be an inventor or even that a computer’s invention could

be patentable. There is no statute addressing computational

PATENTING THE

OUTPUT OF

AUTONOMOUSLY

INVENTIVE

MACHINES

Ryan B. Abbott is a professor of law and health sciences at the

University of Surrey School of Law in the United Kingdom, and

an adjunct assistant professor at David Geffen School of Medicine

at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be reached at

r.abbott@surrey.ac.uk. This article is adapted from the author’s

article “I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the

Future of Patent Law,” 57 B.C . L. Rev. 1079 (2016).

By Ryan B. Abbott