This event took place on September 23, 2021.
In this webinar hosted by Cornell Law School, Womble Bond Dickinson attorney Dr. Chris Mammen spoke on how artificial intelligence is forever changing intellectual property laws around the world.
As we progress into the fourth industrial revolution, intelligent machines are more powerful and sophisticated, capable of performing complex tasks autonomously by communicating with other machines, with little or no human intervention. This raises the questions: can artificial intelligence be “inventors” under patent law or “authors” under copyright law? Over the last several years, agencies in the U.S., U.K. and the E.U. all answered these questions in the negative, seemingly closing the issue. In August 2021, the debate over naming AI algorithms as inventors gained new momentum when South Africa agreed to issue a patent naming DABUS the AI as an inventor. The following day, a court in Australia ruled in another DABUS case that AIs can be inventors on Australian patents. These two rulings demonstrate that, far from being over, the debate is just getting started.
