Property law; patents; requirements of registration; statutory interpretation; meaning of ‘inventor’
Facts: Thaler applied for a patent for an invention he claimed had been ‘autonomously generated by an artificial intelligence’. He said the invention had been produced by a device called DABUS, an acronym for ‘device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience’. In the patent application, Thaler gave the inventor’s name as DABUS. The Commissioner of Patents refused to accept the application on the basis that s 15 of the Patents Act1990 (Cth) (‘Patents Act’)required a natural or legal person be identified as the inventor. Thaler argued that an artificial intelligence device could legitimately be named as an ‘inventor’.
Issue: In terms of the Patents Act, can an artificial intelligence device be named as an inventor?
Decision: Only a natural or legal person can be named as the inventor in an application for a patent.
Reason: The ordinary meaning of ‘inventor’ is ‘a person who invents’, and this is the meaning which should be given to the term in the Patents Act. A ‘person’ means a natural or legal person with a legal personality. An artificial intelligence device is neither of these things. The provisions of various sections of the Patents Act support this interpretation. The court said [at 95]:
In each of these provisions [s 32(2) and s 34(1)] the ability of a person to make an application for a patent was predicated upon the existence of an “actual inventor” from whom the entitlement to the patent was directly or indirectly derived. Paragraphs (a), (c) and (e) describe the actual inventor as, respectively, a person, one that is deceased and has a legal representative (which must be a person), and one that is not resident in Australia. Paragraphs (b), (d), (f) and (fa) all contemplate an assignment happening between the patent applicant and the actual inventor. It is clear from these provisions that only a person with a legal personality could be the “actual inventor” under this legislative scheme.