The Patent Act requires inventors to be natural persons, a federal court ruled in the case of Thaler v. Hirshfeld, rejecting arguments seeking to expand the definition to include AI. In the seventh episode of our podcast In That Case, Shook Associate Polly Tran discusses the ruling and its implications. 

Tran said the case stemmed from a plaintiff who alleged he’d created an AI capable of forming patentable creations, and filed two patent applications with the AI listed as the inventor. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused the applications, arguing that patent law does not expand to include machines in the definition of an inventor. He then filed a complaint against the agency under the Administrative Procedure Act, alleging its refusal to process his applications was unlawful. 

In his lawsuit, the plaintiff argued the Patent Act should incorporate AI because it would incentivize using AI and better protect moral rights.

“The plaintiff reasoned that human inventors’ moral rights currently stand unprotected due to the necessity of a human inventor to list themselves as the sole inventor, even when they have only had a partial contribution alongside an AI,” Tran said. 

The case is Thaler v. Hirshfeld, 558 F. Supp. 3d, 238 (E.D. Va. 2021).

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