AI in IP

The rise of the machine age has a significant role to play in leading the modern era of scientific growth and innovation. The successful implementation of the automation capabilities with human intelligence has resulted in what we commonly refer to as Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the present fast-paced world, AI has its applications and uses in almost every other field including, finance, healthcare, aviation, automated vehicles, education, entertainment, to name a few. Machines with the abilities of autonomous thinking and higher capabilities of learning are being conceived and implemented with every single passing day. In the field of Intellectual Property (IP), AI holds immense potential for challenging the core standards that form the basis of the Patent Law. The grant of a patent to an AI-generated innovation would act as an impetus for further improvements that would otherwise be hard to obtain purely through human ingenuity.

PRESENT SCENARIO

India has now emerged as the brand new hotspot for filing the Patent Applications in the field of AI. As per the WIPO‘s (World Intellectual Property Organization) recent report issued, India is among the top ten countries filing the maximum number of patent applications.  In the first-to-file race of AI-based patent applications, India stood at the 8th position and has witnessed an excessive boom in this regard for quite a while now. As a dominant subset of AI, Machine Learning (ML) constitutes one-third of all the recognized inventions or innovations. IBM, a multinational information technology company, is one of the chief contributors from India as well as a top contender in the world, with an impressive record of 5,930 AI-based patents. With the continuous advancement in AI, its technological cousin ML, and their widespread use in consumer products in the recent years, the rate of patent filing and the number of grants in this field shall keep increasing rapidly in the coming years as well.

CONCERNS AND ISSUES

As per the current Patent Law in India, someone (conventionally a natural person) who merely applies the logic to come up with something manageable cannot be referred to as an inventor. AI is giving the machines a unique power to inherent creativity and the competence to think solely as a kind of computational innovation. If the above argument is logical, an equally compelling thought would be, “What AI machines can invent?”

The whole idea behind the AI-based machine possibly conceiving a patentable invention opens a complete range of possibilities along with several legal offshoots. The state laws and enterprises have to address various concerns and seek answers to many questions, which are as follows:

  1. Will an AI-based machine have the same lawful protection as compared to its human counterpart?
  2. Is the AI-based machine the inventor or its creator?
  3. Are the existing Patent Laws capable of sufficiently accommodating this paradigm shift, or is there a need to have a new set of laws in place?
  4. Can an AI-based machine involve in Intellectual Property Infringement?
  5. Will it obtain royalties upon allowing any third party to commercialize its invention?

BOTTOM LINE

The very thought of the world where the AI inventors are going hand in hand with the human inventors is both frightening and astonishing; however, it indeed seems to be the direction towards which we are currently heading. If the patent grant is made available for the inventions by AI-based machines, the existing patent laws need to put in a whole lot of effort for catching up. Although it will possibly take a very long time to address the complete scope of AI, the extraordinary abilities these machines display have undoubtedly given rise to the idea of a machine-led era of creativity in the Intellectual sphere.