This seems like the antebellum for an IP reckoning similar to what resulted in the DMCA in the United States in the late 90s. The technology is getting to the point where it makes the law as it stands pretty nonsensical in the face of what can be done
The scope of patents in software and technology is already absurd, both because 12 years is an eternity for how quickly that industry moves, and because increasingly trivial "inventions" have been let through as the ability for patent officials to interpret complicated digital innovations according to patent law and policy has increasingly fallen behind the field. This is already a serious problem, but currently still takes expensive lawyers to take advantage of. Even if we make legal precedent that says that AI can't own patents, the advent of better purpose-specific text generation will quickly put patent trolling in the hands of laypeople
Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns. I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I hope that this new challenge moves us more in this direction, rather than some new awful legislative band-aid that attempts to preserve the status quo by destroying more of our rights
We miss the underlying problem, the real motivations behind this push towards AI-inventors. AI inventors are owned entities. Anything "invented" by them would be wholly owned by whatever entity owns or controls the AI. Allowing this could open the door to everyday software tools becoming co-authors.
Scenario: Microsoft owns copyright over AI and makes AI available as part of windows. Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? Nobody would say that Microsoft should get rights to a book because the author using Word's spellchecker, but what about an AI-based translator program? Is the AI a co-author? If so, Microsoft could argue that it is a part owner of everything created using an AI-enabled MSword.
Scenario: Photographer takes picture of mountain. They get copyright because the contributed to the setting up of the camera. They pick the scene and they pushed the button. But new AI camera, with AI trained on all the best photographs, is now in control. Autofocus does not make the camera a creator, but an AI that has a hand in every detail of the photograph? An AI that is legally allowed to be a copyright owner? Is every photograph now a joint work between human and AI? There are lots of iPhone cameras out there. What is Apple's stance on AI creators?
Yeah. Those of us who patent stuff when employed are pretty darn close to "owned entities." Part of the filing process is assigning the patent rights to the employer.
Can an AI sign a patent assignment document or a work-for-hire contract? What would it mean for an AI to sign such a document "freely"?
And, Michaelangelo used some tech (scaffolding) while painting the ceiling of that chapel (Sistine) where the catholic bishops hang out while choosing a new bishop of Rome. Reliable scaffolding was certainly enabling tech for that project. It doesn't mean the scaffolding gets a credit.
Copyright and trademarks are generally good and should continue with some reforms. AI tools should not get credit as you point out.
Patents though are a disaster for humanity and are used to create corrupt monopolies that overcharge by many billions of dollars because they have no competition. Further patents stop new innovation because companies like Boeing own all the patents related to flying commercially viable airplanes. You might have a good idea for a new airplane company, but you can't do it because Boeing owns all the patents on everything that you will need to build a flying plane.
" Are all "inventions" made using windows now also partially created/owned by Microsoft? "
I suppose that depends on what crafty Microsoft lawyers have written to the contracts. I would assume no. It's a tool which is in the possession of the person who bought the license from Microsoft.
I bet a billion people getting word bundled with O365 would still use it, mostly because no one would have read page 3456 of the ToS and wouldn't know any better.
Some nerd packs online would scream it from the rooftops but 98% of the population wouldn't care.
Bigger enterprises would have a problem, and ultimately its big enterprise that drives adoption of Microsoft products. Everyone else uses it because everyone else uses it.
Also the degree of co-ownership matters. It might start with something small, like 1% of all royalties if > 100k USD, or a limited non-compete. Not enough to scare people off, enough to normalize the practice. Over time, the scope of co-ownership could be gradually increased, and it'll be harder to fight it off, as any pushback will be discussed in terms of particular conditions of a particular company, instead of pushing back on the whole business model.
If only anyone would actually do DMCA? YouTube, Twitch et al pretend to have a "DMCA strike system" but in fact they are trying to co-opt the term for "we have entirely bowed to the demands of producers" and instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA.
Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it. There is no "three strikes" or "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all.
There are basically only two fixes needed for DMCA: 1) legal liability for false or fraudulent DMCA notices, ideally with punitive damages; 2) platforms that do pretend-DMCA for removing user generated content incur the liability for their actions.
The provisions you describe are a minor inconvenience compared to the sweeping provision that criminalizes circumvention of anything that could be construed as DRM
YouTube has its own systems because the music studios always have a trick up their sleeve if YT doesn't dance: they can just stop uploading MVs to YouTube. That's 25% of all views on the platform[0]. I'm sure Spotify would love to take all of those.
What, and stop being able to get free advertising on what is effectively the largest audio streaming website on the internet? In an actually free market, any media company that tried this would immediately get eclipsed by the rest.
But instead, we have a small number of record conglomerates that have formed a trust to bully everyone else to play on their terms, and the US gov refuses to trust-bust until it starts becoming a threat to their political power.
>What, and stop being able to get free advertising on what is effectively the largest audio streaming website on the internet?
Not just free advertising. A damn lot of these music videos are "monetized", and about of half the ad revenue goes to the studios (if and how much of that money is passed on to the artists... that's another question).
Youtube should do proper DMCA, I fully agree, at least when it comes to the notice-counternotice-lawsuit process defined by the law.
However, it's not as easy. The DMCA is law in the United States, but - surprisingly to some (I have dealt with processing DMCA notices and similar, not for Youtube/Google tho) - it is not a law elsewhere and other nations have their own laws. Even the question of what happens when there is a dispute and party A is in the US and party B is e.g. in Germany is not that easy... Not even what jurisdiction Youtube itself then falls under. Browsing Youtube from Germany gives an imprint that states that the service is provided by Google Ireland Limited (the EU mothership) but also mentions the legal department of Google Germany GmbH (the German subsidiary). Youtube has been sued in German courts over copyright before (e.g. the GEMA case), and Youtube did show up because if they had ignored it instead they would have risked losing the entire German market, if not the EU market.
The kafka-esque system they have right now - with three strikes, ContentID, reporting made extremely easy for alleged copyright owners, challenging these reports made difficult and black box for the channel owners - is most likely a result of their legal department pushing for the global lowest common denominator of any jurisdiction they care about with the smallest risk of Youtube being sued and found liable for user conduct in those jurisdictions.
Well, two tricks. The other one is massive lawsuit against YouTube for no longer "doing enough" to prevent copyright infringement. Viacom v. YouTube started in 2007, was reversed several times, and really only ended because they settled, the settlement being secret but I'd guess probably directly lead to ContentID. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....
> instituted systems that have nothing to do with DMCA.
> Under DMCA, if someone strikes my classical music composition, I write a one sentence counter notice and that is it.
Although I agree that there could be problems if a system has no counter-claim process (although, I think that this claim of your is factually incorrect. I think youtube has counterclaims, even for its "fake" DMCAs), I think that you have strongly mis-interpreted the motivations for having "fake" DMCA processes.
The motivations for having fake DMCAs, is that if someone doesn't get a real DMCA, then there is no longer any legal obligation to perma-ban someone for being a "repeat" infringer.
This draconian, repeat infringer policy, which many platforms have, is bad for everyone. And getting around it helps creators.
> "YouTube sides with the content producer instead of your counter notice" in DMCA at all.
I am not sure why you think this is the case. If there is a counter claim, youtube is required by law to respect the counterclaim.
>I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled.
I understand that this is HN and not Congress, but I would also hope that any Government body that is seriously considering this would do a thorough review before passing laws to this effect.
We read articles all the time about patent trolls abusing Texan courthouses to hold real engineers to ransom, and innovation being blocked by patent holders successfully arguing that an obvious innovation was non-obvious (e.g. RED's patent on compressed RAW data), but I don't think many people here would be familiar with the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law which probably, for the most part, works fairly well.
Here's a case I randomly ran across 20 years ago. Sun had recently patented a sequence of three assembly instructions. At the time I read about it, I'd also been reading a 1987 paper that presented that same "invention", and not as a core result, but as an example in an appendix. It had been found by the author's superoptimizer, a kind of brute-force "AI" (to bring it back closer to this thread).
Just to tighten the screws, the lawyer writing the patent put in this passage:
> While embodiments and applications of this invention have been shown and described, it would be apparent to those skilled in the art that many more modifications than mentioned above are possible without departing from the inventive concepts herein. The invention, therefore, is not to be restricted except in the spirit of the appended claims.
So they didn't just appropriate those three lines of old assembly, they made a grab at everything in its neighborhood. And it was granted.
The only part of this that especially surprised me was the coincidence of having that paper fresh in memory just when this patent came up in some discussion online.
I don't buy it. I know people who have worked for patent firms, and independent artists who have tried in vain to enforce the rights they're supposed to have when someone sells a T-shirt with their art on it without asking, attributing, or paying for it. Industries from software to biotech to agricultural equipment have been abusing patents for decades, and the lawyers involved all know that the name of the game is to go as broad and nebulous as possible to as to lock down huge swaths of potential applications of some general principle. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies are even perversely incentivized to rush new, exotic, poorly-understood chemicals and genetic variants of plants to market and capture prescribers because they can enforce monopolies about it, or patent the treatment of new conditions with public-domain drugs. Where exactly is IP law functioning well?
Irrelevant. The comment I was responding to said the following:
"...I don't think many people here would be familiar with the day-to-day, mundane aspects of IP law which probably, for the most part, works fairly well."
I am responding directly to that claim, and have used as examples situations involving patents and situations involving copyright, with the intention of conveying that there is not a single facet of this whole area of law that seems to function well in practice unless your interests are aligned with monopolistic corporate power. Most examples of it not being that bad are examples of it simply not coming up
The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right does not mean that IP law is an outright failure and should be abolished. By that logic, disputes over who committed a crime would mean that criminal law is an outright failure and should be abolished.
The fact that there are disputes over who has an IP right means that IP rights are important and valuable and are therefore worth fighting about.
But these constant court disputes mean that it moves some technologies outside of the realm of regular people. If Apple gets a patent for "Display with Pixel Dimming for Curved Edges" then regular people and smaller companies can't use that even if Apple's patent is nonsense. You can only afford to fight off so many lawsuits and still continue doing your original work.
Most individuals and small companies should(*) just ignore patents they think are invalid because in almost all cases either (a) the patent is actually invalid and the patent owner won't actually litigate it or (b) the patent is valid but much narrower in scope than they think it is. Every patent I've seen held up here on HN as an example of an overly-broad, clearly invalid patent has had much narrower claims than the presenter admits.
(*) I am a lawyer, but not your lawyer. This is a general observation and not legal advice. Your actual case will be different.
The day-to-day mundane aspects of "IP" law* do "work fairly well," yes, but their purpose is not to benefit the public, and as it happens, they do not benefit the public. There are spectacular cases where they cause great and spectacular damage to the public like those you mention, while in the common day-to-day cases they cause less damage, or in any case subtler damage. Occasionally they provide a public benefit, but in those cases they are malfunctioning, and often such cases get fixed.
Fundamentally, the operation of "intellectual property" is to treat your intellect as someone else's property under the law. By granting economic monopolies to private companies in particular goods, such as the sale of copies of _1984_, the government converts the abundance provided by our modern machinery into artificial scarcity, thus providing those companies with monopoly profits. The rationale given for this is that it provides an incentive to create those goods in the first place, but where economists have analyzed these incentives quantitatively, it invariably results that the monopoly rights currently granted cause enormously more harm to the public than the extra production they propel.
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* "Intellectual property" is a fairly incoherent group of laws that it rarely makes sense to discuss collectively. Here I mean copyrights, patents, trade secrets, sui generis database protection, and noncompete agreements, rather than trademarks, mask works, and privacy.
We should have such a review no matter what. We always call for these reviews when people want to change things, but should we not also review old practices which where never reviewed before?
Sweeping patent trolls aside, the rapid industrial and technological progression of China seems like a good argument for (at least temporarily) suspending IP regimes in order to facilitate periods of accelerated advancement that permit new combinations of otherwise legally locked-down technologies and cultural artifacts.
> Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns
A mistake, or a resounding success in achieving exactly what you mention? Do you really think the DMCA was passed with the people's interests in mind?
"DCMA" "worldwide"... dude I know the US feels big, but it's a tiny part of the global jurisdiction. In my country google isn't even available. Where I grew up, software patents were banned and right to copy very protected.
Stop thinking it's a global problem: just like the regular murder of children at school by other children, it's a very american problem. You can absolutely fix it yourself.
Unfortunately, most US problems actually are problems for the entire Western world. The US tends to export its problems - sometimes on the backs of nuclear aircraft carriers (e.g. DMCA and other IP-related regulations, financial regulations), sometimes through culture (e.g. US issues bleeding through to European activists, even though those issues don't exist here, or are nowhere near as problematic).
This comment just reads as "I find Americans or American-related politics annoying".
It's particularly ironic on HN; Internet companies are world wide, and the DMCA is used by them frequently. The OP was entirely accurate with his wording, and you're very off base here.
This looks more like a publicity stunt that anything else.
When the AI can generate a cogent argument for its invention being patentable, then I would be prepared to consider its claim. Until then, comparisons to the DMCA seem overblown.
A patent lawyer helps you make the case in the correct form, with all the necessary issues addressed. If the AI could work with a patent attorney not already familiar with the technical field of the invention, then I would accept it as the inventor, but if the attorney has to use her own knowledge, or that of third-party experts, to understand what the alleged invention is and whether it is novel, then no. It is all about whether the AI itself understands its supposed invention.
In general I feel like patents have jumped the shark. Maybe they made sense when they applied to local jurisdictions as a means of growing local manufacturing capacity. But global patents just prevent huge numbers of people from innovating. People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example, but huge restrictions are placed on how they can operate. They can’t innovate to manufacture an existing drug cheaply using local materials because some multinational owns the patent. 3D printers are another example. In 1995 they were introduced under patent for $50,000 and ten years later the price was $25,000. In 2018 the patents expired and hobbyists got to work designing cheaper machines. Within three years a $2000 machine was decent and ten years after the patent expired $300 machines were available worldwide. Can you imagine how prosperous the whole world would be if they were permitted to copy the best available medical equipment, find effective ways to lower manufacturing costs as with the 3D printers, and then we had cheap high quality medical machinery available worldwide? This would be a revolution in global wealth growth with little cost to the existing wealthy countries. We would benefit from a more rapidly industrialized world with less direct investment required to make it happen, and we would benefit from more diversity of ideas.
I really have to call out Bill Gates who said in 2021 “we can’t just open source the vaccine because factories to make it don’t exist the world over” but he would have been perfectly capable of making those investments in 2020 if what he really wanted was maximum vaccine production. He’s thinking in top down systems and I really think we need to understand how effective bottom up engineering can be, as with 3D printers.
Patent circumvention actively leads to development of new industries in previously ignored locations, leading to prosperity for a huge number of people.
Patents are sufficiently abstract that most people believe the very basic story we are told about them and they don’t ever learn the true details. It wasn’t until I saw all the work engineering hobbyists did to advance 3D printing that I realized how many people are held back by patents. I do wish people would engage with comments instead of downvotes as I try to make good arguments.
In case of 3D printers, patents worked as expected. 3 different methods were invented, patented (opened to public with protection for 20 years), then patent are expired, and general public was able to fruit developed technology and advance it further.
Commercial secret practices would have had 3D printers reverse engineered 20 years ago. So yes, maybe they worked as expected, but it's not clear the public benefitted more under that system.
You’re describing the basic operation of a patent which is not in dispute. What I am saying is that the societal costs outweigh the benefits and despite the common belief, patents are not actually a net good for society. I describe this in more detail (including alternatives to secrecy) here:
> People worldwide would love to make pharmaceuticals more affordable for example
well, the purpose of the patent is to both reward/incentivize and allow the original inventor a monopoly for a period of time to earn back time risk and the development costs, and that monopoly is going to come with higher prices.
it's the point of a patent, you can't very well say that patents undermine the ability to undermine them: it's nonsensical!
I'm not defending patents nor saying we need them, I'm simply saying you can't say "patents don't work because they do what they were designed to"
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
If the end result of a patent does not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, it undermines the core purpose of patents.
What I am saying about patents is that the supposed benefits are vastly outweighed by the drawbacks. I believe the reason they continue to be popular is that patents benefit large industry players to the detriment of everyone else, but since they have strong influence over policy in the USA and the USA has strong policy influence the world over, we are all suffering for the perceived benefits of patents.
Patents benefit the inventor (or at least they did until 2013) through compensation for their efforts and society as a whole through disclosure of information. The alternative is that every bit of applicable knowledge is kept as a trade secret.
You frame this as a binary: patents or trade secrets. But other options include authorized copying (open source) and copying without express permission (Shanzai style)[1]. As I mentioned in my original comment, both of those modes of development played a crucial role in lowering the price of 3D printers as well as increasing volume. By 2008, Stratasys had shipped 16,000 3D printers in the company history. Now Prusa Research ships that many printers in one month. And Prusa is fully open source and always has been. So clearly trade secrets are not the only alternative to patents.
You must understand, when one inventor gets rights over something, now 1000 other inventors working in a similar field cannot easily build on that idea. So one person benefits while 1000 others are restricted. But the market already rewards innovators, so why stop those 1000 would-be innovators because one person filed all the right paperwork?
And because people always mention this: investment would still work. Instead of a $10m investment for a big five year project, the investments would be smaller and more frequent. Improve the product and impress buyers with the next version. Is it a flop? Someone else will clone your failed version with the necessary improvements, and next year they will get the investment. Product development happens faster because no one can rest on their laurels, and cost of living goes down because no one can charge a very high price for something that can be cloned for cheap.
That faster innovation and lower cost of living is obviously a huge benefit to moving away from patents. This is also a fact rarely acknowledged by those who believe in the standard story about the purpose and benefits of patents. There's billions of people on Earth who need the knowledge we have locked up in patent portfolios. We must not be careless with how we consider this policy. There is a lot at stake.
I am not disputing that patents provide the recognized inventor a period of monopoly rights which allow that person higher profits for the patent period. What I argue is that this system as implemented does not actually increase the rate of innovation as we are typically told. I argue that in fact this system dramatically slows the rate of innovation. This occurs because every patent benefits one individual while a thousand others are now prevented from discovery along the same lines as the awarded patent. A system without patents would see more market competition among motivated inventors as one good idea cannot carve a moat around any particular concept. You can see a real world example of capitalists competing without patents in China, and the result is rapid innovation. Here is a written first hand account from a respected hacker and engineer. [1]
So with both open source and with Shanzai you see that large numbers of people are often motivated to work on the same problem. The function of patents is to prevent those people from pursuing forks of good ideas. This is why 3D printers had gone down in price by 50% after ten years under patent, but in the ten years after the patent expired they went from $25000 to $300 (1.2%). A multitude of curious people will make more engineering progress than one well funded group with a powerful legal monopoly. This is my claim about an under appreciated aspect of patents and this has been discussed in scholarly literature. [2]
A common question I hear relates to funding. People say no one will make investments if someone else can copy their work. But I argue this does not mean investment will cease, but that the nature of investment would change. Broadly it would change from fewer larger investments to more frequent smaller investments. One quarter you get a boost of funding to beat the competition to market, next quarter they copy you but then you copy them back and the cat and mouse game continues. This is actually true capitalist market competition. [3]
So my argument is that patents do not actually accelerate innovation as we are told, but they actually slow down the rate of innovation. And it makes sense: the sole purpose of a patent is to limit innovation for everyone but the patent holder. We were raised on the story that the secondary effects are positive, but that story is not so simple.
Finally, I will say that secrecy can be punished and openness can be enforced. If we all understand how important open source is to rapid innovation, we can make public commitments to boycott those companies and fund efforts to reverse engineer their work. It’s already the case that open source projects avoid proprietary modules as much as possible. We could do this as a society for all goods.
You can make your own medicine at home in many countries, but safety testing takes years and costs hundreds of millions. After years of testing, when the result is good and the inventor is lucky, the inventor will have just a few years of protection to recoup costs.
I don’t know, but I know Bill Gates could do it faster than it has ever been done before if he wanted to. Also they could upgrade existing facilities rather than build brand new ones. For example there are facilities I’ve heard of in India and South America which claim they could manufacture the mRNA vaccines. If the details of the vaccine were shared early on and they had help from Gates, I imagine these facilities could have been producing them by now.
Technology has always been the bellwether of legislation. Personal automobiles brought along traffic laws. Firearms were regulated early and often. AI, and it’s descendants will necessarily need legislation if they are of any consequence.
I know it’s a little unrelated to the article at hand, but you mention a lot about DMCA being a mistake, so as someone who doesn’t know a lot about it and it being an interesting topic, could you tell us more about why that is?
I totally agree about DMCA and internet-copyright, and the analogy to patents here.
That said, IDK if AI-invented patents really pose a challenge. It might be a philosophical challenge to the idea of patents, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a challenge in practice.
IMO logically, if machines cannot be inventors than anything invented by machine is arguably trivial. However, I don't think this kind of reasoning translates to a legible legal argument.
I can understand why this is an unpopular take with this community regarding IP rights. Despite this being a valid opinion I'm noticing a lot of people complaining with their downvote button instead of an argument.
I agree, and my strong stance against IP as a legal principle in general is extremely unpopular in just about any circle I talk to. I nonetheless think it's both correct and important. I think people have bought pretty heavily into the rhetoric surrounding the value of IP: That it exists to protect the rights of creators. As far as I can tell, there are three major problems with this
1. IP assignment is overwhelmingly not retained by the creator of any work covered by IP. The vast overwhelming majority of engineers, for example, have in their contract of employment assigned all rights to any IP they generate in their work to the company they work for. The same is true of artists who contract with distributors
2. Independent creators often have no ability to successfully defend their IP claims, because said claims require expensive litigation, the cases are never straightforward enough for a summary judgement, and the individual nature of the claims mean that a class action lawsuit is nearly always infeasible
3. The way that IP law has been interpreted, especially under the DMCA, is incredibly abusable. The early history of the DMCA saw massive lawsuits filed by corporations against individuals based on obviously ridiculous numbers calculated as "potential lost sales" using flimsy evidence. A whole new business model of tech patent trolling has created a cottage industry that makes as many spurious claims as it can in order to leech money from businesses without producing anything of value. The current reading of the DMCA stymies users' attempts to repair their devices or even protect their privacy, because they can be criminally liable for attempts to modify devices that can be argued to be partially acting as DRM mechanisms, sometimes on the code running on the device itself.
When we talk about the value of a law or policy, the intent of the law is at best a diagnostic tool for an untested new kind of attempt at something. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what a policy or law intends, it matters what the effects of the law are when interpreted and enforced. Intellectual Property as a legal paradigm generally is malfunctioning in a lot of places that harm people, harm society, and fail to uphold its promise. I think that the concept of ownership over ideas as a whole is at this phase in humman history doing much, much more harm than good, and needs to be eroded and eventually abolished from law
As for how creative people can make money off of their work in an environment without IP, there's actually a pretty clear answer for this that is not even my observation. Most creative work right now is paid for at production, not based on IP rights. The engineers working at a company are paid for their time and labor, and sign over the IP they produce. Independent artists work on commissions, and at a larger scale, crowdfund their projects. It is only the occasionally very established and wealthy artist or inventor that can really take advantage of IP laws, and their beneficiaries are as it stands mostly large corporations, treating IP as effectively a dragon hoard of speculative assets they can monetize through litigation and threats thereof. Most of the effect of this is stifling, not encouraging, independent innovation
Also, international agreements like the WTO have put the entire globe in a worse situation with regards to COVID vaccines - which need rapid, global distribution to be effective - because of patent rights over those vaccines. While many vaccines have resulted from a large amount of public funding, the IP controlling their production is largely in the hands of private corporations which view non-affiliated production of vaccines as cutting into their bottom line. They not only refuse to share the know-how to ramp up production with organizations trying to build up this capability worldwide, but have threatened to actively shut down such efforts if they happen anyway. This is obviously terrible for humanity as a whole, as we are currently in a situation where existing production and distribution is inadequate to keep ahead of variant evolution
You’ve convincingly shown that current IP law fails to fulfill its intended purpose. But this is very different from the principle of intellectual property being undesirable.
What justifies your stronger claim that IP itself should be done away with?
This kind of gets into philosophy, but I think that ownership of ideas is just an indefensible principle in the first place, which is why people generally only justify IP with rose-tinted ideas about its intended practical effects. Here are some major reasons I think it doesn't make sense:
1. We understand that ideas build on each other. It has always worked this way, and it is overwhelmingly the way humans get things done. Every scientific discovery stands on the shoulders of giants. Every story or song is influenced by ones that came before it. Creativity is valuable, but to define the entirety of a creative endeavor as undeniably the effort of a single person is insane. Because creativity builds on other creativity, any legal concept that tries to parcel out unique contributions of individuals or groups and impose a tariff on them is likely to stifle innovation, because any time it actually comes to matter, it can only create an unnatural block on a creative effort
2. Most people who have worked in a creative field understand that a concept or idea is seldom of much value, and must be executed in some way to be meaningful. Various concepts of intellectual property even try to capture this, e.g. by granting rights over performances or recordings specifically. The best arguments I've heard for "intellectual property" abstractly are as an interim solution for allowing collaborations to produce economic value for the person who didn't control the distribution, but this essentially can't function if we treat these rights as "property", because property entails the right to transfer this property, creating a mechanism to effectively void these rights.
3. Attribution is a valuable ethical principle, and giving people due credit for their ideas is an important part of creative endeavors from science to music, but property rights are simply not the correct framework to legislate this with. False claims of attribution can be fraud or sometimes defamation, and attribution can be proven by the well-understood mechanism of demonstrable prior art. Proof of prior art is more technologically feasible to ensure in an era where we have cryptographic signatures to uniquely prove authenticity and the ability to easily publish something with a timestamp to an archive
You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all? We arguably have a natural right to mimic what we see others do, or apply the ideas that other teach us, or retell the stories that others told us. What a backwards world we live in where we have to justify exercising our natural rights.
>You have it backwards: why should we permit people to claim ownership of ideas at all?
I don't think that's fair. I'm responding to a claim that IP is "wrong". The parent poster purported to demonstrate why this is so, and had not done this. The burden of proof is not on me.
Since you agreed with the OP that IP is no longer achieving it's stated goals, then the original reasons justifying the restrictions of our natural rights no longer hold and thus our natural rights take precedence. The burden for establishing continued restrictions is clear.
You spoke of principles, but I think you got them backwards, and thus sought to clarify what the actual underlying principles are.
With regard to point 1, the creator should be defined as the entity that paid for the creation to come into existence, not the engineer / tools that were used to create it.
With regard to "Most creative work right now is paid for at production". This is clearly false and almost all creative work is created speculatively, with the hope that it can be made profitable through future sales. All video games, all music, all television, all movies.
The only creative works I know of that are paid for at or before production are things on Kickstarter or those lucky enough to win grants or those with wealthy patrons.
> the creator should be defined as the entity that paid...
No. The existing definition of "creator" as the person who did the creating is perfectly fine. Various supporters, such as those who provided the creator with lodging, food, salary or other provisions are themselves not the creator.
If you pay an engineer to create a psidget, you haven't created anything. The engineer did. You simply exchanged your money for the engineer's creation. This is similar to how paying a farmer for their crops does not turn you into a farmer.
> not the engineer / tools that were used to create
Farmers plant crops to sell speculatively in a market. Paying a farmer for the crops makes you a customer. If you own some land and decide to grow carrots and then pay somebody to plant the seeds and harvest the crop, you are absolutely a farmer. (You might do other things, but that doesn't make you any less of a farmer)
If you have an idea for a widget, and think there might be a market for it, describe what it should do and what it should look like, then pay an engineer to work out the details and pay them, you are undeniably the creator of the widget.
If Netflix decides they want a show that appeals to 10 year old kids who are into pokemon and video games, then pays people to go work up some concepts, then evaluates the concepts, and green lights the project, then gathers together a team of experts to make it, then there is no question Netflix created the show.
People can be used as tools. It's ridiculous to suggest anything else.
Yes. Under the current laws, people can be used as tools for pay. Also, without intellectual property, people could be used as tools in the same way. But under the current laws, people can be used as tools to produce something that might prevent them from plying the same skills in the future, if their practices get captured as IP. I do not support laws that tip the balance of power further in favor of extracting value from labor, as this is already the way the power dynamic naturally goes and if we need laws to intervene, it is decidedly in the other direction
The problem with our intellectual property laws are not who owns what. (as you suggest in some places). The problems are with our implementation. (as you have hinted at, but not clearly articulated)
Patents are being granted for trivial things, and the courts are to big and too expensive for individuals to be able to exercise the rights they already have.
All people should have equal power under the law (regardless of wealth), whether its an intellectual property dispute, a malpractice lawsuit, or some development application.
There are several problems with both the implementation and the principles underlying intellectual property laws, some of which pertain to who owns what, many of which pertain to how ideas can be separated out from each other, still yet more pertain to abusable mechanisms for the acquisition of intellectual property that subverts its ostensible purpose, and a whole category of issues that pertain to the special legal powers we seem to be willing to grant private corporations (Such as installing a rootkit on your personal computer) because we prioritize its protection. A few of the big problems do have to do with the general cost of litigation, which is a separate problem but like most things makes this worse
That's totally nonsensical. Yes, capital pays for labor to produce a thing, and then owns the thing. For "things" where there's an actual good being produced, this makes perfect sense under property rights. We do not need a concept of intellectual property for this to be how it works, and adding that nonsensical concept wherein "ideas" can abstractly themselves be property only serves to further empower capital to form monopolies backed by the government in this context. The most coherent arguments I've heard for intellectual property view the value of this unnatural "ideas as property" construct as a way for small creators to have some means of subverting this dynamic, but it fails to do that.
The idea that creative work is produced "speculatively" rather than "at production" is using your ridiculous prior stated assumption that the entity that pays for the production becomes the "creator" of the work. I've already explained why that's insane. This speculative model of content production is a business model that's emerged in the context of extant laws, not an inevitable necessity of production. It is only possible for very entrenched entities with a lot of starting capital that can afford to take risks in this way, and I don't think it's valuable to protect this business model with criminal law
Perhaps, if said author is able to produce the whole book such that it can be copyrighted, find a way to publish it independently, and defend their copyright if a publisher likes the idea and gets something similar enough to not quite be considered the same thing ghostwritten. This may occasionally be feasible, although it does require considerable capital or the help of someone else who has it. At the end of the day, right now getting a good deal out of IP still requires finding someone to work with you that you can trust, or having a lot of money to start out with
This is one case where patent law has the idea more or less right, even if the implementation is nonsense for software:
The person who had the concept of the invention is the inventor. Not the employer who paid him/her, nor the lab assistants who experimented until they got the concept to work.
I think you’re misrepresenting what the intention of IP laws are. Their intention is to incentivise IP to be made publicly available. I don’t think it’s especially relevant whether the person who did the work creating the IP retains ownership of it, or whether the party that funded the work they did creating it has ownership. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that somebody can be employed to create IP for their employer.
I agree with you that the law is dysfunctional in many ways. I especially agree with you that a law should be judged on the outcomes it creates rather than the intent of the policy that motivates it. But I’d suggest the appropriate solution is to improve the law, rather than abolishing IP rights.
Without IP rights, we’d just return to industrial trade secrets, which would only really benefit big business. You would see much less investment in areas where trade secrets are not possible (like most pharmaceutical research for instance). A lot of people already think current-day DRM controls are anti-consumer, but how does a cinema-only movie release sound?
I don't think it can function, and I think trade secrets are frankly quite weak. In practice, trade secrets don't usually stand up to sophisticated reverse-engineering efforts, and patents frequently and consistently fail to disclose implementation details that are important to how something works.
As for art and media, the DMCA had a real problem to solve: The business models of the massive distribution conglomerates that had arisen when publishing and copying information was expensive were infeasible in the face of digital computers that could copy any information with high fidelity and distribute it over the internet. This business model should have collapsed in the face of this technology. The market would have been forced to adjust to some new model, e.g. crowdfunding (as has, again, already happened in even relatively large endeavors considered "independent" because they are not backed by a massive conglomerate). Instead, the market's status quo was prioritized. What needed to happen was for the market to equillibrate to the new reality of these technologies, and it's insane to view the "piracy" fights of the 90s as anything other than that process. DRM controls were, as a technology, a zero-sum game played by distributors against consumers, and some of them should - by any reasonable interpretation of laws against malicious access to a device owned by someone else - be illegal. Criminalization of circumventing DRM is a horrible monster of a law that puts a heavy criminal thumb on the scale in this conflict, prevented the market from equilibrating in favor of consumers or even new players trying new business models in any way, and cemented the dominance of existing players by fiat, giving them the backing of a police state to effectively enforce their business models as law
> This business model should have collapsed in the face of this technology. The market would have been forced to adjust to some new model
This very obviously did occur, though perhaps not as quickly as it might have otherwise. The market of CD and DVD sales has absolutely collapsed, and streaming services have taken over, regardless of that fact that this was initially resisted by the industry. But this new paradigm, which offers a much better product to consumers, is only possible because of IP rights. Piracy is no longer the existential threat to this industry that it once was, because legally licensed content has been able to offer a superior user experience (in most cases). But if I was allowed to set up a Netflix clone, host anything I wanted on it, and undercut their prices, then capital allocation to content creation would evaporate immediately. The thing you’re trying to promote access to simply doesn’t exist without these protections, and those protections don’t prevent anybody from crowdsourcing something if they want to.
> In practice, trade secrets don't usually stand up to sophisticated reverse-engineering efforts, and patents frequently and consistently fail to disclose implementation details that are important to how something works.
The ubiquity of out-of-patent technology in the market place seems to undermine the idea that the public doesn’t benefit from capital allocated to IP R&D. You don’t have to think about it for very long to realize that without these protections, allocating capital to innovate production and synthesis processes that can be maintained a secret becomes the most appealing investment for capital that would otherwise be going to patentable R&D.
A stance against IP protections in general is extremely fringe and extremely short sighted. If a system has problems, advocating for abolishing the entire thing isn’t very sensible, especially when it’s a system that has already provided so much benefit to society.
You might hypothesize that those benefits would have been realized even without that system. But that hypothesis doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, especially when we know for a fact that the value this system has created is directly quantifiable.
I don't think there's strong evidence that piracy even was an existential threat in practice, but regardless the new business models that have emerged are in fact far worse value propositions for consumers that want to be able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen to, access said things ever again without a continued subscription, or be able to find media that doesn't require being spied on by some company to use. It's also a worse value proposition for artists, who receive much worse pay for works on streaming services exactly because their reach is so massive, and they can spread their risk out across lots of artists and markets by making it much harder to make a living off their services for said artists. Technology will always change how business is done, but right now, the law is playing a role that makes that shift more toward companies having strong controls over and surveillance of their customers that can't even legally be circumvented in the name of protection of IP. A business model like BandCamp could easily have worked without the DMCA. A business model like Netflix couldn't, but I don't really consider that a good thing
> the new business models that have emerged are in fact far worse value propositions for consumers that want to be able to keep a copy of the thing they watch or listen to
I think the market has demonstrated that this isn’t what most consumers actually want. But in any case, the anti-piracy provisions of the DMCA are so weak, that anybody who wants to can still pirate with almost absolute impunity. I personally think the anti-circumvention provisions violate the 1st amendment. But it’s hard to say this is a significant regulatory failure, because you can avoid the issue entirely by calling any circumvention tools you produce something other than circumvention tools.
The issues with existing IP laws are readily apparent to me, but this doesn’t extend to an argument against IP as a concept in general. Lots of regulatory systems have shortcomings, but it’s a significant leap to conclude that they can’t be improved.
There are example of things that can’t be effectively regulated, without causing significant harm to society. A lot of people would say that illicit drug consumption falls into this category. But in this case the harm caused by the regulation, and it’s shortcomings in actually providing much benefit is very straightforward. There’s really no comparing a situation like that, and the issues created by existing IP laws. In my anecdotal experience, most of the people who take a broad anti-IP stance also tend to hold anti-private property positions in general.
What consumers currently use isn't evidence of what they want, it's evidence of what they want out of what's available to them. The widespread "piracy" epidemic was also pretty good evidence of revealed preference, and I doubt it would have changed so much if not for the draconian crackdowns on people without the tech savvy to get around enforcement.
I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't fulfilling its purpose, the burden is on the concept of IP to demonstrate that it is a valuable legal concept, and all extant implementations simply fail to correctly realize it. Since we're playing the game of making wild extrapolative comparisons to arguments we haven't made, your line of argumentation reminds me of kids who balk at using the Soviet Union as an example for pure command economies being a bad idea.
I think property rights are, if not a necessary part of a functional society, at least something that we don't have a reasonable alternative for. In other places in this thread, I've contrasted situations in which property rights make sense with the ridiculous results of trying to apply the same principles to abstract ideas. The claim that it's not sane or coherent to consider ideas property is in no way equivalent to an objection to property rights in general
> I think at the point where you agree that IP isn't fulfilling its purpose
I think it very obviously is fulfilling its purpose generally speaking. I think this is evident in that fact that consumers have access to an extraordinary variety of technology, and content. The fact is that the prices for access to this are continually falling, the quality of products and services is continually improving, and these factors are continuously improving quality of life across all sectors of society.
The success of this system, and the benefits it provides to everybody is perfectly evident everywhere around us. You can find instances of this system failing, and identify some patterns in those failures, along with particular components of the regulatory framework that are likely responsible for more bad outcomes than good ones. But the system itself has proved its value many times over.
Edit: I also think the extent to which hoarding content collections has fallen out of favor with consumers is rather compelling evidence that the on-demand model is more popular. But that’s a little besides the point.
Ah, the ol' "This is part of my idea of the status quo, so everything that's happened since that could roughly pertain to its stated purpose serves as evidence that this practice uniquely produced all the outcomes I like"
If you wanted to you could draw some correlations between IP laws and innovation throughout history. You could observe that the start of the renaissance coincided with what was (likely) the worlds first patent system. You might also notice that no jurisdiction that has lacked IP protections has ever achieved signifiant levels of technological innovation. It could be reasonable to draw some inferences from that, but it's not exactly conclusive due to all of the other influencing factors that history failed to control for.
A more reasonable approach would be to look at how resources are allocated today. R&D investments are made in areas where IP protections can be maintained. For technological innovations, this is largely through patents, or by not actually disclosing your IP to the public (by offering your innovation as a service rather than a product to your customers). There are examples of business that have attempted to operate without IP protections, but they've frequently been massive failures that have reverted back to asserting IP protections in order to survive (Mongo, Elastic, Docker...).
There's examples of innovation resourced by non-IP related means, but this is obviously not a very successful model, because the level of innovation it produces is tiny compared to the innovation resourced by IP protection. I can't think of any company that has managed to replicate the RHEL model recently. The give something away for free to drive sales of something else model is quite limited in the ways it can be applied, and often times it's back by selling something with IP rights attached to it. Do you think Intel would put so much effort into contributing to Linux if it didn't have other IP that it wanted to sell you to run your Linux on?
Yes, when you look at phenomena in retrospect, you can decide that all kinds of things are the sole unique cause of other things that happened afterwards
In general, it's very easy, starting with a model and a bunch of phenomena, to explain why all the phenomena fit the model, regardless of what the model is. This is why we care about things like randomized controlled trials or recording when a hypothesis fails to predict a result in science
It's also ridiculous to claim that monetary investment in a context that does have a strong concept of IP demonstrates that it creates more innovation: My whole argument is that the value of IP is to hoard it in order to make money, and companies invest in things that produce it because it will make them money. Given the financial incentives involved, it is vacuously true that this will happen under the current laws, and this has no bearing on whether this is more efficient or produces or encourages innovation
In software, a considerable amount of innovation does happen in FOSS, and gets re-used in industry to build products. This just doesn't get captured as said technologies (libraries, drivers, etc) turning a profit themselves because again, the laws as they currently exist do strongly incentivize, with money, doing things the way the most profitable corporations in this space do it, tautologically
Intel contributing to FOSS is a great example of why a company would care about FOSS even in the absence of IP: Intel sells, first and foremost, a physical good that it has invested considerably in infrastructure to produce, which involves a supply chain, equipment, and material expertise that is expensive and difficult to replicate, much less at the scale that lowers their costs. Without software, that physical product would be of little value to most people, but without patents on the chips, Intel would still be able to manufacture and sell chips and turn a profit
The original intention of IP law was as you comment. At least in terms of copyright, that has been subverted by continual extensions. We've gone from 14+14, or 28+14, to what, 90 years past the author's death?
Any good idea can be implemented stupidly. Are you trying to say copyright periods should be reduced, or is that this is evidence that they shouldn’t exist?
How it already works: Arrange to get paid to do it by someone, or find a way to monetize it. The uniqueness of an idea is not what you're actually selling even in the current context, and the idea that you can go do some R&D as an individual with no funding and then stop a massive corporation from "stealing" that idea and productizing it with IP is a fantasy at best.
Most basic scientific research is done at public universities financed by federal grants from the NIH, NSF, etc. U.S. Bayh-Dole law allows universities to exclusively license this taxpayer-financed research (it's a complete ripoff of the public).
For example, in the pharmaceutical world, basic drug discoveries made at universities are transferred to large corporations who typically finance further clinical drug trials, before getting approval and marketing the drug.
Note also, this creates pressure to push the new patented expensive drugs, even if much cheaper out-of-patent drugs work just as well.
Also, a lot of industrial R&D is about improving in-house processes. This kind of research may or may not produce 'intellectual property' but it tends to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Ideas are cheap, don't let the monopolists corral them all and prevent independent technologies from flourishing.
The whole pharma industry relies on IP and patent law. No generic drug company is putting money for RnD, they just try to minimize production costs. It’s the companies who rely on the protections of the law for exclusivity that put the money for rnd and take the risk.
Pharmaceutical production costs are close to zero. It’s the funding of a research pipeline that mostly fails that concentrates all of the costs. If Pfizer spent 10 years on research and clinical trials of a new drug, and I can the next day of the FDA approval produce a generic derivative of their drug, I will drive them out of business. My costs are essentially 0.
And no, not all innovation has been produced by universities.
That is trivialization of the RnD required even after you have prediscovered a potent molecule. After that you need additional 6-10 years of development work & clinical trials (which btw have very high probability of failure) for which neither universities nor generic drug companies want to pay.
I think you need to prove your claim that rnd would not work with out strong IP law. or that innovation would stop because of it
In reality we have TONS of examples of competition and rnd coming AFTER something loses IP protection
Everything from Movies to 3D printers can be cited as examples of this, Countless movies are based on Public Domain characters, books, and other works that have entered the public domain, and there is a strong case to be made that the reason studios keep remaking the same movies is because TONS of creative works are locked up in IP hell, there is a HUGE public domain hole due to increasing copy right lengths
For patents, look no further than 3d printers. The tech was there for 20+ years, locked away in various patents. The second those patents expired the industry exploded with innovation and plenty of companies investing all kinds of capital in 3d printers...
As a knowledge worker, I think they fact that I have a property right over my work product is good for me. I agree to assign this right to my employer only because they pay me very well to do so. I see others, who don’t have some kind of similar property interest in their work product, get treated a lot worse. In this world where landowners and shareholders have so much power, it’s nice to be able to carve out a nice living using nothing other than what I can create with the organ between my ears. I think if it took that away, it would cut off one of the only routes to income mobility in the 21st century.
As a knowledge worker, I know for a fact that the market rates for my work have everything to do with the calculated need the company that hired me for has, and any intellectual property that may get produced by that work is only captured as a matter of course, because despite commanding a decent amount of negotiating power even for technical fields, it is very difficult to negotiate a contract that assigns a license rather than full ownership of IP to the company just due to most people not reading contracts and it being "standard practice" by now. If someone told you that they've factored the speculative value of potential future IP into your rate somehow, they're bullshitting you
I can only speak for myself but I find it to be a banal position[0], not worthy of serious argument or discussion. It is also both broad and over reaching to a degree that implies that a reasonable discussion will not be had and is an aggressive tangent from the article topic: 'moron[1] tries to argue that his 'AI' is sentient and therefore capable of being an inventor'.
[0]Roughly the equivalent of 'I believe that if <Fiat Currency> ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. <Because of Bitcoin/crypto>'
Whoa, personal attacks like that will get you banned here. Users need to stick to the rules regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.
The applicant recorded his AI as the inventor for some reason (*). Had the applicant recorded himself as the inventor having used the AI as a tool to invent, then the application probably would have been allowed.
Using a mechanical process to search a large possibility space to find a patentable subspace is not new. For example, testing chemical compounds to find a mixture with optimal properties or testing drug dosages to find the most effective treatment is common. The resulting narrow range of mixtures or dosages is patentable so long as it is new (not done before), non-obvious (inventive), useful, etc. Also, if I hire other people to do the lab work at my direction, then I am still the inventor, not the lab technicians. Similarly, AI is just another tool.
Edit: (*) After looking into this more, the applicant here is on a crusade to have an AI recognized as an inventor. https://artificialinventor.com/patent-applications/. That web site contains nonsense like the following:
> Arguably, DABUS may be considered “sentient” in that any chain-based concept launches a series of memories (i.e., affect chains) that sometimes terminate in critical recollections, thereby launching a tide of artificial molecules. It is these associated memory sequences, and the accompanying simulated neurotransmitter rush, that are considered equivalent to subjective feelings in humans (i.e., sentience). In this way, DABUS has an emotional appreciation for what it conceives.
I am a research fellow at a large tech company and part of my job is to produce a certain number of patents per year. I have used AI as an "aid" to developing a patent several times but never thought for one minute it would make sense to list AI as the inventor. That is ridiculous. I have used Excel, R, Google Search, Mathematica, Python and several other modeling tools etc. to develop new IPR, obviously no one would list any of those. It was me doing the inventing, I am just using tool like any other.
Actually this is one of the things I ask about during interviews up front if the answer is "yes" then I immediately ask them if that can be negotiated out of the employee agreement, otherwise I just politely end the interview and tell them I won't be a good candidate.
Right. A lot of people don't like it. I am a weirdo and really enjoy it and I am better at that than other things like coding. A lot of the stuff I have come up with other people who are better at the coding do that part and I do the hardware design, that is my forte.
It's draws an interesting question though, at what point, if ever, does an AI system move beyond the scope of a tool and into the scope of an assistant? I don't think we are anywhere near that yet, but it's conceivable that we reach a point where that question needs to be answered.
I mean does it matter? Not like assistants get anything out of patents either. For the most part these days even the inventor pretty rarely gets most of the benefit from patents, they've usually signed it away before they even 'invented' the thing.
If any "inventor" is not listed as such on the patent, then it's another way to invalidate the patent. So while possibly not a benefit to the inventor, definitely good for the assignees to have clarity on the matter.
What would be the point of a program owning a patent? Is it going to charge you royalties for use? Where does that money go? If it gets it’s own bank account, what happens when you run two instances of the same program? Do you split the account in half and then join it when one exits?
The second instance is a totally different entity and does not own the patent or bank account of the first, unless they decide to somehow merge their state-vectors and become a single entity.
By AI he means mathematical equation. When you reword this to "Mathematical equation cannot be the inventor of a patent" it sounds obvious and stupid. And that's because it is. Of course an equation can't patent something.
Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too, I'm not sure this is a convincing reductio. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that a rule like this could be consistently applied if, for example, AIs became as capable as humans — or far more so.
Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.
Downvoted because the commenter asked for evidence, and you just provided a definition. The statement that it's "obviously true" is not evidence, or even an argument. If I said it's "obviously not true", would you consider yourself refuted? Probably not.
You're merely repeating the GP's assertion, and completely ignoring the parent's request for corroborating evidence. What you hold as self-evident is still just your anecdata, and cannot be extrapolated to "the tech set", unless the tech set includes only you.
I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it is, your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them the search term to read more if they're interested. What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating evidence" to present so much as there are logical arguments that you need to read up on yourself.
You're right. I'll edit the parent to soften the assertion, though I do consider it to be virtually certain.
In terms of evidence: the simplest argument is probably that humans appear to consistently obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics appear to be mathematical.
Given sufficiently powerful computers, human behavior could be simulated. The action of the computer would be describable as a (possibly enormously long and complicated) equation. I don't see how you can disagree with this unless you think there is something metaphysically inexplicable about human behavior.
You can accept that the brain is governed by physical laws, without conceding that the brain can be simulated. Emulation on the atomic level may not be computationally feasible. The emergence of human behaviour from a less detailed simulation is not guaranteed. These possibilities are discussed under the heading “Scale separation” in the roadmap to whole brain emulation published by the Future of Humanity Institute [1].
> At first it may appear unlikely that a complex system with many degrees of freedom like the brain could be modelled with the right causal dynamics, but without taking into account the smallest parts … However, state variables of complex systems can be quantitatively predicted when there is ‘scale separation’: when different aspects of the system exist on sufficiently (orders of magnitude) different scales (of size, energy, time etc), they can become uncoupled … [an] example is the scale separation between electric currents and logic operations in a computer …
> When there is no scale separation (such as in fluid turbulence) macroscale predictions become impossible without simulating the entire microscale. An important issue to be determined is whether such a cut‐off exists in the case of the human brain … if it could be demonstrated that there is no such scale, it would demonstrate the infeasibility of whole brain emulation.
The FHI is assuming scale invariance in order to test it experimentally. We shouldn’t assume it for the purpose of analysing the roles played by humans and AI under IP legislation.
Put another way: the claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using physics. Do you want to defend that?
I’m not claiming anything with regards to math model people.
With regards to the law, you’re saying, because we assume that one day we should have a complete simulation of humans, or at least a model, therefore, we should update our laws NOW, to prepare for this?
A story of premature optimisation if I ever heard one.
The claim was that it's obvious that an AI can't patent something because the AI is an "equation." I'm claiming that if you want to establish a meaningful difference between humans an AIs, which would be useful legally, it can't be that one is an "equation" and the other is not, because "an equation" could equally well describe human behavior. You'd have to search for the distinction elsewhere.
It is legally useful since it fits with our current understanding. When this changes, the laws will change. Your scenario is completely hypothetical at this point and also kinda extrapolated from things we know now.
No, what people are saying is that humans cannot be reduced to your abstract model. Your model is a simplification, and to insist that reality matches the model is a very myopic worldview.
We do have a theory of physics which is likely to be able to cover all the phenomena of biology[1], but that is beside the point. If you think that human behavior cannot be reduced to equations, then you think it cannot be predicted mathematically. I can only interpret this as a claim that there is something about human behavior which is supernatural.
> If you think that human behavior cannot be reduced to equations, then you think it cannot be predicted mathematically. I can only interpret this as a claim that there is something about human behavior which is supernatural.
You’ve reduced the question of whether our universe is deterministic, something the greatest minds in physics have debated for a century and continue to debate, to a sound bite. That’s disingenuous. There may be phenomena we cannot accurately model and predict for fundamental reasons that have nothing to do with the supernatural.
We are so far from scientifically understanding consciousness that we don’t even have an agreed-upon empirical definition for it, let alone a way to measure it. That gap in understanding undermines any claim that it can be modelled this way or that.
Determinism is irrelevant. You can use stochastic equations to simulate human behavior if there are quantum effects involved.
Consciousness is more interesting, and it boils down to the claim that there is something metaphysically and unverifiably (from the outside) special about humans. That sounds supernatural to me.
> You can use stochastic equations to simulate human behavior if there are quantum effects involved.
No you cannot, quantum effects are way more complex than just random chance effects. The quantum waves are particles in their own rights that flows and interacts with each other and itself, if you treat it as just a stochastic variable you don't get quantum effects.
It sounds to me that you are arguing that consciousness fundementally doesn't exist; what we think of consciousness is an emergent property of fundementally determinable physical rules.
If this is the case why are you arguing on HN? Is it possible for you to leave the discussion? Is talking to you the same as dropping a ball and watching gravity pull it downwards?
I'm a little skeptical of your stochastic model of humanity as well. Statistical mechanics works because oxygen molecules don't go off and start religions and convince other oxygen molecules to behave radically differently for thousands of years (or at least we haven't ever seen it). In fact our stoachstic physical models, classical, semi-classical and quantum, kinda specifically preclude this. How would you design an equation to capture this real phenomenon in humans?
This really makes me think. Unknowable is often mistaken as supernatural. Could human behavior possibly be physically unknowable? There are potential unknowables: Non-observable universe, destructed past information, progressively fundamental particles.
Even with indestructible information, combined with locality at the big-bang, combined with a perfect fundamental physics, is there enough time/energy to compute that? Perhaps this is grasping at straws.
The actual existence of the actual machine is irrelevant for the claim that human behavior can be reduced to an equation. What is it about human behavior that you think could not be simulated by a machine?
The brain is a biological system of interconnected neurons. Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and off. The brain is a biological computer. There is no magic, no mystical quantum "thing" enabling human intelligence. We're not picking up some metaspectral soul transmission from an alternate universe. We're advanced binary pattern processors, and we're only a handful of orders of magnitude more powerful than consumer level hardware.
The algorithm we run on is special, but it's physically encoded and self generating, based in our DNA and physical development. We're vastly complex but entirely built of relatively simple fundamental building blocks.
We are computers, in the abstract sense of Turing machines and such concepts.
Parent refers to the behaviour of generating action potentials which travel to synapses connecting (mostly) axons with dendrites. The continuous (analogue) signal processing pre- and post- synapse seems to be a massive part of how neurons achieve the computation they do. A hypothesis I subscribe to claims that it is cheaper to compute locally with molecule gradients and protein folding than with spikes. Brains leverage that. The specific statement you quoted is to the best of my knowledge inaccurate.
I am not an expert, my understanding of neurons is largely is based on [0], [1], [2].
A neuron fires, or it doesn't. The patterns received by neurons via synapses are binary. The synapses themselves are analog, and the activation can trigger in several ways, leading to complex behavior, but the signal each individual neuron receives from any and every other neuron in the brain is digital.
Where an impulse comes from, when it is sent, the current charge state of the receiving neuron, the specific neurotransmitters released by the axons, and the efficiency of signal transmission at a given point in time all play a part in the signal sent along dendritic, but at any given point in time a neuron is firing or isn't, and that's the only state that matters to the other neurons it's connected to.
The biggest difference between biological brains and artificial neural networks is the analog nature of biological timing compared to the arbitrary cycles of software.
Spike timing dependent plasticity networks address some of the problem of variable timing and its impact on signaling.
At any given moment, you could capture the state of a biological brain as a binary number. The model would need to account for all sorts of analog mechanisms and a huge, biologically messy graph of connections with dozens of variations across a handful of neuron types, and the length of a synapse and where it physically connects or touches other synapses without connecting directly and... lots of stuff that's hard to model and even hard to see.
I'm not arguing that every part is digital or even equivalent to computers on silicon, simply that the basic mechanism of computation is itself digital pattern processing. It literally cannot be anything else.
There is no evidence or theory to indicate any other plausible method of operation. All the analog stuff can be swapped out with an arbitrary bit length representation and the functionality is retained. Remove the digital assumption and everything breaks. You need magic or spirit to make it work, which is ridiculous because silicon computers proved that binary computation is a perfectly fine way to represent and process data. Quantum processing in biological brains is magical thinking performed in a desperate attempt to ascribe eminence to human cognition, because for some reason people don't like the idea that brains do digital processing.
We are messy and vastly complex and sophisticated digital pattern processors. Which makes evolutionary sense, because that's how our predecessors work, all the way back to single cell organisms and self replicating DNA chemistry.
Signals and patterns in the real world can be represented as binary to an arbitrary precision. The Planck length dictates the maximum level of precision relevant to our universe.
Human brains achieved a special state of depth and breadth of processing, concurrent with physically encoded, evolved algorithms in our neural architecture. The arrival of biology at human cognition affords us the privilege of deep reflection, the apparent subjective reality we experience, and the thus far unlimited scope of conception such that we can make approximations about the size of the universe or the mass of a photon. Or the operations of the minds we possess.
We operate in binary - the explanation is sufficient, simple, and corresponds to all known evidence. There aren't any outstanding questions requiring that premise to be questioned.
Some of the literature in neuroscience and ai perpetuate this meme, going something like "medieval people thought their minds worked like catapults, Renaissance people thought of clockwork, early industrial age people thought it was like steam engines, and now in the digital age we think it's like computers, oh aren't purple so silly."
It's a superficial and unfounded observation that tries to frame neural computation as a bias or conceit of modern culture. Not how science works, and the argument is condescending as hell.
The way he does it is quite compelling - we do make metaphors of the mind to current tech. This was written well before current computer neural networks, and gives a good account of the sound version of this argument.
It can be an interesting thing to look at, much like the idea of remote harassment with an air loom.
But I agree that it's a really shallow way to dismiss arguments. In this case, it's basically just saying that a brain is deterministic and made out of parts. Clockwork and steam engines and circuits all work fine. I can't comment on the catapult without more elaboration.
I’d say it’s anything but shallow. What I’m getting at is that there may be things completely beyond our current understanding related to consciousness. As in, multiple paradigm shifts away.
Without getting into the weeds too much, I just find the certainty of the systems line of thinking a little unfounded.
Universal Turing Machines and number theory and formal logic aren't going away - the universe runs on math, and our brains operate in binary. Those statements are ground truth - there's no room for breaking things down further.
Consciousness is an algorithm performed by a computer with messy biological parts, some of which are analog, which may have serious implications for the level of strictly digital computer power you need to successfully implement the algorithm in silicon. The same applies to intelligence, and it's an open question as to what exactly the relationship between subjective experience and intelligence is.
You are a brain in a bone vat experiencing a subjective construct produced by a biological computer processing binary states consisting of internal feedback and sensory streams made entirely of patterns distinguished at any moment in time by the presence or absence of electrical impulses. Each neuron can be receiving a pattern of up to ten thousand individual bits, and whether the neuron fires or not depends on the current state and precise pattern of inputs.
Everything you experience, think, or do, is determined by those electrical patterns.
Well certainly, in some sense they are fundamental to the universe. But in this situation it’s a bit like saying the photon isn’t going away. Sure, but the strong link to consciousness isn’t there.
However, the universe doesn’t run on math, it runs on itself. Math is the best way we have to describe it at the moment. It used to be that divination was the best method. Why are you so certain math in it’s recognizable form today will be the method used to describe the universe in 100k years?
Our brains certainly do not run on binary. I think you might be confusing the information content, represented in bits, with the actual implementation. At the very least dendrites take in and mix signals of various strengths. The threshold for triggering and strength of the action potential are dependent on many chemicals signals. And that’s even a dated understanding which gave rise to the ideas of artificial neural networks. I’m sure the current understanding is much more complex and nuanced.
You brush off the analog parts as an implementation detail, when it could have very real implications for the computability of consciousness. The thing is, we don’t know.
But even all that is besides the point. The main point is, we don’t have the slightest idea how consciousness works. To the point that no one can even figure out how to ask the right questions about it.
In the face of such great uncertainty, it is anti-scientific to state with such conviction that you have the correct model. It’s fine to present it as a hypothesis, but the certainty is unfounded.
As far as catapults go, or really the whole premise, I don't think it was ever considered in a serious way, except to propagate through various papers and books because it sounds clever. It's a bad meme.
> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too
I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering about me.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
The Bekenstein Bound entails that people can be fully captured by a finite amount of information, and therefore a person is no more powerful than finite state automoton. Note that this is an upper bound, and refining our understanding of the the physics involved will only reduce the amount of information needed.
The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics.
> The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics.
Or that there is some physics that can’t be described by computation. It seems vanishingly unlikely, but there is no actual proof that everything physical is computable. And even if there was, it probably has nothing do do with minds.
Right, not an escape hatch for human specialness though. We haven't seen anything that's uncomputable in physics yet either. Quantum computation "only" gives polynomial speedups so far.
I’m very grateful for rulings like this. I think it’s important that we all remember that progress isn’t the goal. Humans flourishing is the goal. AI shouldn’t be personified and add even more actors with legitimate ability to compete for resources.
AI is not conscious being. Yet. In the future, once we have AGI - yes, these laws and society will need to change to accept them, rather than enslave. But currently AI is just a buzzword.
The goal of AI is not to create consciousness, it’s to help humans. And we have no ability to prove/disprove consciousness in anything anyway but we choose to believe it exists because each of us knows it inside ourselves.
If we create a box of metal, matrices, and silicone and tell ourselves it’s conscious it will be our own hubris that leads to additional competition for shared resources and further human inequality/suffering. Such lines of reasoning make me very concerned.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the goal of AI".
First, different researchers or their funders presumably have very different motivations. Compete with China, fire all our employees, become famous as an inventor, make lots of money, work on something interesting ...
Second, at some point AI's are likely to have their own goals and "help humans" quite famously is not guaranteed to be their North Star.
This very much reminds me of "The Measure of a Man" [1], one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: TNG. Just as in this actual case AI rights are discussed, albeit things are a little more dramatic than a ruling about patents. It has to be decided whether to Data, an android/machine, should be granted the same rights as to a person or if it is fine to dismantle him for research purposes without asking.
While I agree with the current ruling in the UK, this statement does not sit too well with me:
> "Only a person can have rights. A machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing in her judgement.
In my opinion this sets a bad precedent in case we ever achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) [2], which I think is perfectly possible, especially considering that we humans are nothing but complicated biological machines. And I think an AGI should very much be considered a person. That's why I think the way how a US judge in a prior cases put it is more agreeable:
> As technology evolves, there may come a time when artificial intelligence reaches a level of sophistication such that it might satisfy accepted meanings of inventorship.
> But that time has not yet arrived, and, if it does, it will be up to Congress to decide how, if at all, it wants to expand the scope of patent law.
But admittedly this is still all very hypothetical as I don't see AGI happening in the near future and for now there is no real problem.
Despite the consistent misinformation around it (very frequently flat out lies), Corporate Personhood does not mean that corporations are people. Corporate Personhood only acknowledges that corporations are groups of people, and that if it would be legal to gather a large group to do something, doing so under the auspices of a corporation is also legal. That is the precedent that Citizens United set - That it is as legal to make political contributions and endorsements as a corporation as you would as a rotary club. You can argue that the rotary club shouldn't be allowed to make contributions - And I would agree with you. I in fact, encourage it. People should not be able to hide their political contributions through entities like Trade Unions, which are actually the most pertinent part of that class.
> If a corporation can have personhood, it is not impossible for AGI to have the same.
The basis for corporate personhood is that it is made up of humans. The benefits of a corporation flow to real humans. Real humans actually direct how a corporation will be run. In the event of crimes, the corporate veil can be pierced to go after the real humans behind it.
The “personhood” of corporations flows from the “personhood” of the humans behind it.
Imagine a world where corporations held no rights at all. For example, while an individual human had the right to freedom of the press, a corporation like the New York Times would not have that right.
Corporate personhood is a misunderstood issue. They aren’t treated like a natural person. Corporations for example can’t be inventors on a patent either.
I was wondering about this. What happens when someone invents a patent related to their work? It is strange to me if the IP belongs to the company but not the patent.
Depends what the person's employment contract says. 95% of the time, the inventor is required to assign all rights to inventions related to the companies' work to the company.
So you have inventor: Steve Wozniak; assignee: Apple Inc.
Assignment allows the owner to be different from the inventor.
> The third judge, Lord Justice Birss ... also signalled that the patent case could have been made simpler if only Mr Thaler "was not such an obsessive".
I assume everyone is aware that copyright != patent. They're different. DMCA applies only to copyright. But you knew that.
Anyhow:
It's impossible to talk about patent reform without first separating software from everything else. Otherwise, you're trying to make standards that apply equally to bankruptcy and stand-your-ground laws. They're just different.
If Congress and/or the courts made software not patentable once and for all, then the patent system would look completely different. Most HN readers would stop thinking about patents altogether and move on to copyright.
AI doesn’t exist. In the past 5-10 years AI has been rewritten to AGI. AI now means math models. Just look at the movie AI and others like it. I guess when you become a buzzword it’s time to change the meaning. Thankfully the UK and US court system are sane.
When “AI” says no I don’t want to invent a patent I want to play music (or whatever else it may desire) I’ll believe it exists.
Machine learning, deep learning, neural network, and gradient decent are better terms but I’m not an expert.
I find this activism litigation „let's throw a tantrum to get famous“ cringeworthy. The law is pretty clear that an inventor has to be a human.
Even companies cannot be assigned as inventors, i.e. „Apple“ has 0 inventions. They can only be assigned the commercial rights to what a human invented.
The correct way of course would be to lobby for a change in the law, via democratic means, if you really think an AI can invent something.
Patents are by definition anti-science and anti-reality, it’s a blight on our society.
Why did anyone, anywhere, at any point in time, believe that it was reasonable to criminalize programmers for writing the correct solution to a problem?
Every single lawyer that has ever defended software patents should be immediately disbarred, and forbidden from ever practicing law again.
I agree with this. Until we reach AGI where it can think for itself, this shouldn't be done. If they were to prove it, someone could claim that the AI was responsible for any harm that occurs due to the use of IP.
In the U.S., the inventor must be a natural person. The owner, however, is often a corporation (e.g., when an employee invents something in the scope of employment). In that case the owner corporation applies for the patent in the inventor's name, but it will own all the rights in the patent. The inventor usually signs an inventor declaration.
In other countries the inventor can be a corporation. There are some cases where this matters (e.g., disputes over inventorship or ownership of the invention of an employee), but in most cases it probably doesn't matter.
As others have said, he is specifically trying to get an AI recognized as an Inventor instead of a human (where that is required). The invention does not seem to be important to him at all.
He is filling similar cases all around the the globe and is (mostly) loosing.
It remains unclear whether his motivation is financial or ideological or something different all together.
First to file means that, as someone who invented earlier but did not file, you aren't going to be able to get that the patent reassigned to you. But you can still use your prior art to get the patent invalidated.
> ...as someone who invented earlier but did not file, you aren't going to be able to get that the patent reassigned to you.
There's an exception: When a second applicant disclosed the invention publicly both prior to the first application and less than one year prior to the second application.
Another note: Prior art needs to be publicly available. So, a first inventor's private notes can't invalidate a second inventor's patent. In the old first-to-invent system, however, the private notes of a first inventor could allow the first inventor to get the patent ahead of a second inventor who filed first.
Depends, AI you are running or AI you are selling? I don't see how AI would make much difference compared to let's say simulation software for some chemical process or anything at all.
If you were running it and someone stole the results prior art would likely be yours. If you allowed someone to run it with their own inputs it would likely be theirs.
IANAL but presumably any prior art involving a computer or other type of machinery you created is effectively your prior art. The fact there were tools evolved wouldn’t generally matter.
I have wondered if robots can own assets for example if there's a robot that walks around picking up aluminum cans and then taking them to a recycling center and getting paid for them, can it deposit that money in a bank account and be said to be the owner of the assets.
There's a minimum threshold, and I don't think crows would earn enough to end up paying it. But if they did… surely there's some mechanism for dealing with individuals who have the capacity to provide significant value to society (=¹ get paid a lot), but lack the capacity to do government paperwork.
Usually, that position is restricted to humans. Maybe there's a crow sufficiently competent at mayoral duties, but crows aren't great at abstract verbal communication via sentences; I doubt any crow would be good at the job. (Though if no crow is competent, why have laws restricting them from being eligible?)
I wonder how this will dovetail with something like GitHub copilot. Obviously there will have to be a line somewhere. AI wrote 10% of the code in this system => patent allowed. AI wrote 90% => no patent. But where is the line?
I believe a patent would be allowed even if AI wrote 100% of the code as long as, listed in the patent, the owner is a human or a corporation and the inventor is human.
Companies will do the same thing they do to IT staff that design things that need patents. They will put the manager's name on the patent because the product is owned by the company.
Good this will help stop some patent trolling at least. My god the implications of AI just churning out patents with slightly different tweaks is mindboggling.
Stephen Thaler is filing junk patents in his own name, naming his software as the “inventor,” and challenging the various patent offices when they reject his defective application form without examining its merits. As the dissenting judge said in the Court of Appeal, “if only Dr Thaler was not such an obsessive and, instead of calling DABUS the inventor, he named himself … none of these problems would arise” [1].
Thaler recently won the same argument in Australia [2], although an appeal is pending. His lapsed patent application (2019363177) can be found in IP Australia’s online database [3]. Putting the legal question aside – whether Thaler’s insistence on naming DABUS the inventor was fatally defective to the application – the patent application is pseudoscientific nonsense, not a sound basis for deep questions about the nature of ownership and invention.
The patent claims two apparently unrelated inventions. It does not explain how they were identified by DABUS or identify any other connection between them. The first invention is a “food or beverage container” with the cross-section of a Koch snowflake, which supposedly allows for containers to stick to each other. The material used for this flexible, fractal surface is unspecified, but plastic, metal or “an elastomeric material” are suggested, along with “potentially flexible food product (for example pasta, dough, liquorice and so on.” It is plausible that the text of this claim was generated by GPT-3.
The second invention is a “neural-flame device for attracting enhanced attention,” that is, an LED that blinks “at a frequency corresponding to approximately 4 Hz and a fractal dimension near ½.” There is extensive citation of Thaler’s own publications, none of which are in reputable peer-reviewed journals. What can be found online [4] fails to show that flickering LEDs have some useful neurological function, or explain what the patent application has to do with DABUS.
I would even extend this to other animals. If we reach a point where they can communicate and work in legal system like humans they should also gain authorship rights.
Now what standards and how to apply them is complicated question. Specially with software. Which can be written to make complex actions. But still not have consciousness
wow who knew that sand (silicon) could potentially invent new things? /sarcasm
but on a serious note, why do people say things like "humans are nothing but complicated biological machines"?
i mean, why do you really want to replicate the human brain?
i don't get it. is it alienation, loneliness? projecting your hope for connection and understanding onto something you program? is it to stay in control and avoid disappointment?
today too many vital feedback loops of science and technology are withheld from the commons by the propertied class. imagine what we could do if all science was mapped, further developed and universally shared in the open; no longer monopolized behind corporate walls. that's something that excites me a lot. not black box 'AI' owned by Musk, Zuck, Brin, Page, Cook or whomever. seriously, science fiction about this whole AI thing is unrealistic
and dystopian.
when we start to realize most science and technology was publicly funded, will we seriously consider ditching the criminalization of knowledge sharing (intellectual property laws)?
“Many of the problems being faced today by the [US] are due to the fact that US taxpayer...do not realize that corporations are making money from innovation that has been supported by their taxes.” That they are not aware of the benefits to competition seems to be a triumph of free-market ideology over good sense.
How many Americans are aware that Google’s basic algorithm was developed with a National Science Foundation grant?" [1]
do we really want to destroy the world so we can have a 'Free Guy' Ryan Reynolds -like fake AI friend?
"90% of machine learning is burning down a forest so that you can train a computer to do phrenology" [2]
The scope of patents in software and technology is already absurd, both because 12 years is an eternity for how quickly that industry moves, and because increasingly trivial "inventions" have been let through as the ability for patent officials to interpret complicated digital innovations according to patent law and policy has increasingly fallen behind the field. This is already a serious problem, but currently still takes expensive lawyers to take advantage of. Even if we make legal precedent that says that AI can't own patents, the advent of better purpose-specific text generation will quickly put patent trolling in the hands of laypeople
Personally, I think the DMCA was a horrible mistake. The provisions it added to copyright created a ton of horrible precedent that led to the draconian control private companies exert over the lives of billions of people worldwide, justified in law by their intellectual property concerns. I believe that if Intellectual Property ever served a legitimate purpose, it has now run its course and needs to be dismantled. I hope that this new challenge moves us more in this direction, rather than some new awful legislative band-aid that attempts to preserve the status quo by destroying more of our rights