Do we want to allow the protection of inventions where AI is an inventor or an author?

Manny W. Schecter, the New York-based chief patent counsel of IBM Corporation, posed this question to the audience during his presentation during the legal track panel discussion on AI and IP titled “AI: Disrupting or Advancing IP?” The discussion was one of several held during IP Week @ SG 2019 at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre in Singapore.

According to Schecter, AI is moving very quickly.

Indeed, it is. People have been tapping AI to develop technologies designed to make us live better and work smarter. So much of AI is being used these past few years that jobs around the world requiring AI competencies have increased drastically since 2013. In fact, AI is even projected to boost the world’s GDP by 15 percent in the next 10 years.

Because the use of AI is becoming more prevalent, the technology has reached points of intersection with IP.

One dimension at this intersection involves authorship or inventorship of a creation, hence Schecter’s question.

Another dimension is access to information. Like humans who continue to gain knowledge and learn new things in their lifetime to be more intelligent, an AI innovation needs lots of information as well. “If you don’t feed them with lots and lots of information, they don’t get intelligent,” Schecter said. It is for this reason that many countries are thinking about changing their copyright laws to allow AI to use information to help it become smarter.

A third dimension is the protection of AI inventions. According to Schecter, there are several aspects which help determine whether an AI invention may be protected and how it can be protected.

One of these is subject matter eligibility. Schecter explained that while a computer generally abstracts other things, AI abstracts man and how man thinks, works and does things.

Other aspects include standards for obviousness and written description requirements on how they are affected by AI.

The last dimension in the intersection of AI and IP involves the technology’s impact on jobs. Will AI displace my job? How will it affect my profession? Schecter said these are some of the questions in IP practitioners’ minds as AI continues its surge across industries.

“Software impacts everything. It has found its way into our phones, our appliances, our cars,” said Schecter. “It’s essentially everywhere.”

Even the most simple devices like pens, pencils, chairs and tables involve software. “Though they don’t have software in them, they were probably designed using computer-aided design equipment or a robotic manufacturing equipment,” he explained, “and they have an impact.”

Even other seemingly unrelated industries like the life sciences have found a way and a reason to make use of AI, Schecter added.

Speaking at the business track panel discussion titled “Capitalizing on the Intangible Economy: Are We Ready for It,” Robert Fletcher, president and founder of ?” Intellectual Property Insurance Services Corporation in Louisville, Kentucky, named some innovations his company has been asked to evaluate for possible patents.

The list includes 3D printing of organs using stem cells, a mind control patent, a lighting technology for blocking off certain parts of the sky called Solar Simulator, CRISP for gene editing, a very strong type of heroin drug called FLAKKA, remote viewing on government-owned land and a human Ebola virus for the creation of anti-virus.

“Are we ready for this?” asked Fletcher during his presentation, posing another question to the audience.

Meanwhile, Facebook, which relies on AI for its services, is currently doing research on three areas in its offices around the world. These are machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing.

According to Probir Mehta, Facebook’s Washington-based global lead for IP and trade policy, the company uses AI to keep the community safe, understand images and text, and promote meaningful social interaction.

“I think we certainly want people to use technology, but It should be done in a way that’s collaborative,” said Mehta, speaking during the same session. “Like everything with AI, there are checks and balances that need to be looked into.”

Truly, every company is now an AI company, as Schecter said.

“We are now at the point where we need to start taking these matters seriously, deciding some policy. These are decisions to be made by patent examiners or even judges. These are the kinds of decisions that need to be made by legislative bodies,” he said.

One such decision that should be made is whether we will indeed allow the protection of inventions where the inventor or author is AI itself.

One firm which seems to be taking its IP policies seriously is Alibaba Group. The conglomerate established its IP protection practice in 2002.

In the Group’s 2018 Intellectual Property Rights Protection Annual Report, these improvements are reported:

• 32 percent year-over-year decline in takedown requests
• 96 percent of all takedown requests were processed within 24 hours on business days
• 96 percent of proactive takedowns were removed before a single sale
• 67 percent decline in suspect listings, and others

In the annual report’s preface, the company wrote: “This decline was particularly impressive given the year over year growth in Alibaba’s active user base, which saw nearly 700 million monthly mobile active users as of December 2018. Alibaba also continued its industry-leading offline collaboration with brand owners and law enforcement in 2018, which resulted in more arrests and the closure of more illicit facilities than the preceding year. These accomplishments were not only the result of Alibaba’s commitment and technical innovation, but also a true testament to collaboration among all stakeholders – rights holders, industry associations, government officials, law enforcement and Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms.”

“We believe that collaboration in IP protection is important,” said Jessie Zheng, Alibaba’s Hong Kong-based chief risk officer, at the legal track panel discussion.

Legal IP protection may be pivotal, but Kevin Lee, executive chairman of Singaporean security company Horangi Cyber Security, reminded the audience that data security is just as important for successful management of intangible assets.

According to Lee, personal data regulation addresses technical topics, management of breaches and cross border transfers which affect new technology deployment like cloud computing, among others.

The problem is that data, which is also an intangible asset, does not fit well with IP policies. This, Lee said, creates gaps where protection is concerned.

Citing the Global Yellow Pages (GYP) v. Promedia Directories case, Lee explained that while a database’s structure may be protected by copyright law in Singapore, the database content cannot be protected. GYP alleged that Promedia copied the former’s listings in its internet Yellow Pages and in different editions of its three print directories, namely Business Listings, Yellow Pages Business and the Yellow Pages Consumer. Promedia then used these listings in its own Green Book directories, thus infringing GYP’s copyright according to GYP.

Singapore’s High Court ruled that no copyright infringement occurred in the first place because while the printed directories as a whole were protected by copyright, their content, i.e., individual listings, were not. The court added that Promedia did not copy a significant portion of the copyrighted material, hence did not commit infringement. The Court of Appeal later affirmed the High Court’s decision.