September 24, 2021

The Court of Appeal has ruled against Stephen Thaler in his case against the U.K. Intellectual Property Office (IPO) that AI cannot be the inventor of new patents.

Thaler had asked the IPO to grant Dabus, an artificial intelligence that he filed in 2018, the rights to two patents, one for a kind of food container and the other for a flashing light.

While the IPO initially required Thaler to name a real person as the inventor of the patents, the authority later withdrew the patent after Thaler failed to follow instructions.

The U.K. panel’s ruling states that an inventor must be a genuine human being under UK law. Lady Justice Elizabeth Laing, one of the judges involved in the decision, “Only a person can have rights. A machine cannot. A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person.”

For more information, read the original story in the BBC.