Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true:

1. Production has started

2. A patent has been filed

The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue.

If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all of the production setup is ready to go.

Merck took a different stance.

There, the patent was filed as soon as the researcher was ready to publish. This meant that there was less time under patent for production but was much better for the researcher as they got their findings out earlier.

The thinking was that being able to publish earlier would attract better researchers and in turn would lead to better drugs, more revenue, more profits.

This was in the late 1990s so not sure how this plan worked out as I haven't been in pharma since that era.

Would be interesting to hear from other folks more knowledgeable.

I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.

What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.

Patents have been mostly a pride checkbox for me, but at the same time being able to get credit for something you could never build is interesting. I’m less supportive of the loose monopoly part though, that seems to be the real issue dampening innovation

Everyone hates patent trolls (non practicing entities who dont implement the idea themselves), but practically its an extremely high burden. I did some patents on financial market plumbing, implementing that requires licensing and infrastructure far beyond any coding or building problem

Thinking of it 10 years before investment banks get around to it I think should still be incentivized someway

But the current system is cooked

The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective

-[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law

I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:

If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.

That doesn't follow at all. A baby doesn't have accountability, but has benefits.

I'm all for accountability being required for important descion making. I too wouldn't let babies make similar descisions.

This non sequitur just makes it sound like you're throwing around talking points and getting them mixed up.

I believe in many countries, the standard for a wide range of IP is that if something is largely produced by AI systems, it can not be patented / copyrighted / trademarked. It seems that "a significant" contribution must have been done by humans, that's the word you'll see again and again.

But I am not sure how one could prove that something is produced mostly by AI, or mostly by human. Right now anyone could use AI models to do most of the work, and just say or make up documentation that it is (major) human work.

The idea that an AI could have some sort of property rights is a nonstarter, legally speaking. It's just as invalid of a legal idea as claiming that a tree could have a patent on the shape of its leaf.

So when people go to the patent office and say "I didn't make this! an AI invented this", the obvious response from the patent office is "cool, well only humans get rights, and if you didn't make it, you can't get a patent on it, so too bad". This isn't a judgement of AI.

Now, a lot of people come to presume that this means that anything that AI touches is not subject to any IP rights -- but that's not what this means at all. Humans are allowed to use tools to create things that they have IP rights to. Your typewriter itself can't hold a copyright to a book, but if you use a typewriter, you can still hold the copyright to the book.

Ultimately, whether or not the use of AI is disqualifying to a human inventor doesn't really have anything to do with AI -- it all hinges on whether or not the human meets the requirements of holding the patent.

implies that if he provided his name as the inventor, the application may not have been rejected.

No, in the US AI output is ineligible for copyright not because "art models are just regurgitating stolen concepts", but because only human created works are eligible for protection.

>only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Formally speaking, it's not the case, though this is commonly misunderstood. Statistical models are definitionally ampliative, otherwise they wouldn't be statistical. One can argue about it until they're blue in the face, but it almost always comes down to a misunderstanding of what the models are, what the mathematics behind them is a description of, and what the underlying logical structures represent.

The thing is that the position and objection to these models isn't actually a substantial, reasoned position where the words have a direct meaning. Though it's dressed up like reason, it's not the point. It's a kind of metaphor. This actually does reflect the nature of intellectual property law. The legal framework is knowingly illogical at an object-level, because the end its seeking is completely divorced from the means. It has to be, because the idea of intellectual property is absolutely unjustifiable in-and-of-itself. It's just a useful legal fiction to make sure people are getting paid by commoditizing ideation. That's not a bad thing, it just means you have to be mindful that bottom-up reason will lead you astray when dealing with it.

The law does not recognize the anthropomorphization of inanimate objects.

But, since the income of a patent office is determined by how many patents they approve, one can dream ...

And even if you did, it's entirely inanimate, how would it even exercise them?

Not sure about patents in the US but irt copyright, only the parts that are not LLM output are copyrightable. All LLM output is automatically public domain.

So if you have a work that was done with AI assistance, only the pieces of that work that are human authored can be subject to copyright. The AI parts cannot, if there are any.

I think it's long past time we get rid of the silly idea of intellectual property all together. If AI has the potential to do any good in the world in its current form, its that.

the likelihood of one single guy having the same data scraping & storage capabilities as the big players, years before them (i see info about DABUS back to 2018), is slim.

The same applies to image generation - they can generate images that almost certainly were not in the training data.

Only after the participant has completed their grift or extraction operation then they begin virtue signalling their ‘morals’. It is fake.

If you are here for asserting morals, this is the wrong industry.

AI is a tool, like your keyboard or your code editor.

Those can't own patents. That doesn't mean anything produced by those tools is public domain, it just means the attribution has to belong to a human.

I haven't been able to square this belief (This is what i believe too.) with what I perceive as so, so many people making projects, putting them on github and slapping an MIT/GPL license on them.

If IP rights can't be applied to generated code then how are they able to apply a such a license to them?

I've asked this before and the response was along the lines of people thinking their multiple prompting amounted to human creative process and therefore it was covered but ... how? Any lawyers around that can ELI5 it for us? Maybe links to a lawyer somewhere who did?

While as a species our key strength has been our intelligence and it’s been core to our identity, and computing has slowly over decades infringed on this forcing us to rewrite what it is to be human, I understand the defensive view.

I also see LLMs and other AI systems spit out complete nonsense that’s truly obvious to most people. But that doesn’t make any of these systems, in my opinion, incapable of creating or bridging novel new ideas that I would call far from obvious had we substituted a human in place of it. I didn’t look at the patents in question, plenty of obvious patents make it through anymore, so that could be the case here, but I believe AI isn’t far away if not already there of creating truly patentable inventions if someone were to push it.