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That’s what Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 says!

Professor Paul Martin from #UNELaw’s Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law recently wrote an article considering some of the legal issues that will affect the opportunities of agricultural technologies in the future (See link to article below). One of the things Paul raised is the idea that it will become more difficult to identify who is legally responsible when technologies fail as technologies themselves become self-generated. Thaler v Commissioner of Patents, while not dealing with liability for harm, points to that possibility.

In Thaler v Commissioner of Patents, Justice Beach had to determine whether an ‘inventor’ for the purposes of the Patents Act 1990 (Cth), and its associated regulation, can be an artificial intelligence system. This is because reg 3.2C(2)(aa) requires that an applicant of a Patent Cooperation Treaty (Washington, 19 June 1970)(PCT) application must provide the name of the inventor of the invention to which the application relates [6].

His Honour found that an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act. He summarised his reasons: First, an inventor is an agent noun; an agent can be a person or thing that invents. Second, so to hold reflects the reality in terms of many otherwise patentable inventions where it cannot sensibly be said that a human is the inventor. Third, nothing in the Act dictates the contrary conclusion [10].

Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 can be found here.