US Clampdown on High-Tec Investments

US President Joe Biden's Executive Order clamping down on high-tec investments in China has also major implications for European companies. The order must be complied with by any "United States Person" and this includes not only companies with headquarters in the US or organised under laws of US states, but...

Artificial Intelligence, Inventive Step and Disclosure

A further decision from the European Patent Office’s Boards of Appeal illustrates the challenges faced by patent applicants when filing for patents for artificial intelligence (AI) inventions but also provides a number of suggestions on the level of detail that the patent office requires when disclosing the invention. The decision...

Classifying Spam – not patentable in Europe

The challenges in obtaining European patent protection for inventions in the field of artificial intelligence have been highlighted in a recent decision by the European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal in dealing with a European patent application Nr. 14725807.3 by Google for “classifying resources using a deep network”.  The patent...

Artificial Intelligence Systems are not inventors in Europe

Shortly before Christmas, the European Patent Office’s Board of Appeal rejected an application to name an artificial intelligence system, Dabus, as an inventor on two patent applications EP 18 275 163 and EP 18 275 174. The full details of the decision have not emerged, but a brief press release gives some details of the case. The two...

Patenting an Artificial Intelligence Invention – guidance from the US Patent Office

In 2019, the US Patent and Trademark Office drafted detailed guidance for the patent software invention. The 2019 Revised Patent Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance included one example (no 39) which was directed towards a method for training a neural network for facial detection. The example was very simple - the...

Artificial Intelligence as an inventor – the German decision

Last Thursday (11 November) the German Federal Patent Court decided that an artificial intelligence system could not be listed as an inventor, but that a German Patent Application needed to name a person as the inventor, but could add that the conception of the invention was aided by an artificial...

Patenting Software Modules

One of the biggest challenges in writing patents for computer-implemented inventions (CII) or "software patents" is the level of disclosure that is required. A patent examiner can reject the patent application in Europe for lack of enabling disclosure (as we have previously reported here) or for "indefiniteness" in the United...