ИИ и патентное изобретательство: примеры DABUS

DABUS, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, is an AI system built by the American computer scientist Stephen Thaler. In 2018 and 2019 Thaler filed patent applications in many countries for two inventions he said DABUS came up with on its own: a food container with a fractal-shaped surface, and a flashing light designed to attract attention in emergencies. He named DABUS as the sole inventor and himself as the owner. He meant these filings as test cases. The results were almost all the same. The European Patent Office refused the applications, and in 2021 its Legal Board of Appeal confirmed that an inventor under the European Patent Convention must be a human being. In the US, the Federal Circuit held in Thaler v. Vidal (2022) that the Patent Act's word "individuals" means natural persons, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2023. In December 2023 the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that an inventor under the Patents Act 1977 must be a natural person. In Australia a single judge accepted DABUS as an inventor in 2021, but the Full Federal Court reversed that decision in 2022. Germany's Federal Court of Justice (2024) also rejected an AI inventor, while indicating that a human could be named even where AI was used. South Africa granted a patent in 2021, but it carries little weight because South Africa does not examine the substance of patent applications. Many people assume these rulings make inventions produced with AI help unpatentable. They do not. The courts decided who can be named as an inventor, not whether using AI disqualifies an invention. What matters now is whether a human contributed enough to count as an inventor. A second misconception is that DABUS lost because the inventions were weak. The cases turned almost entirely on the legal wording that defines who an inventor is.