BGH on Dabus: AI cannot be an inventor
The Federal Court of Justice has ruled on a patent application in which AI was to be registered as the inventor. However, the judges left a way out.
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A patent application from October 2019, in which KI was to be registered as the inventor, is not admissible in its original form, according to the Federal Court of Justice. The patent application was intended to protect a container for beverages or food with a fractal profile. On the patent application form at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) in Munich, Dabus (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) was registered as the inventor - not a human being.
The DPMA then rejected the registration as inadmissible, and the US AI researcher behind Dabus, Stephen L. Thaler, lodged an appeal. In the alternative, he wanted either an address for Dabus to be entered for him as a natural person, he to be entered as the inventor and yet Dabus to be named as the inventor, or his name to be entered as the inventor, but with the addition that he had caused the AI to be invented.
Human contribution is decisive
The X. Civil Senate of the BGH was not convinced by the first two options. Rather, "a human contribution that significantly influenced the overall success of a technical teaching that was discovered with the help of an artificial intelligence system is decisive for the status of inventor", according to the decision, which was published in advance on Linkedin by a lawyer involved in the proceedings. According to the current state of scientific knowledge, there is no system "that searches for technical teachings without any human preparation or influence".
The decisive factor for the status of inventor, from which his rights under the Patent Act are derived, is that a natural person has exercised a decisive influence on the application for the patent. By contrast, the addition to Thaler's name that AI was used in the invention, which was requested as a substitute, was permissible: it was legally irrelevant, according to the Federal Court of Justice, and "can be easily separated from the designation of the inventor and can be disregarded for the recording and processing of the data."
Dabus operator Stephen L. Thaler, who is an inventor from a patent law perspective, has been trying for years to register AI as an inventor worldwide - and has so far failed almost worldwide.
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