Context: South Africa’s patent office, the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, granted the patent to a food container based on fractal geometry invented by DABUS.
Background

• The patent application for listing DABUS as the inventor was filed in patent offices of different countries (including Australia, United States, Europe, and South Africa).

The application was rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Officeand the European Patent Office in the formal examination phase. They gave three reasons:

• Only human inventors: Their respective patent laws only provide for human inventors and NOT for Artificial Intelligence.
• Lack of mental conception: Ideas, for the purposes of patents, require the element of “mental conception”. Such conception is only present in a human mind and not in AI.
• Rights issue: Furthermore, inventorship comes with ‘rights’, which AI is not legally capable of possessing.
• At last, only South Africa granted the patent to DABUS as inventor for “a food container based on fractal geometry”.

What is DABUS?

• Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience or DABUS is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.

Created by: Stephen Thaler

• It simulates human brainstorming and creates new inventions.
• DABUS is a particular type of AI, often referred to as creativity machines because they are capable of independent and complex functioning.
• The system differs from everyday AI like Siri (the voice of Apple’s iPhones).

What are creativity machines?

• Creativity machines have the capability to process and critically analyze data, learning from it.
• This process is called machine learning.
• After the occurrence of the machine learning phase, the machine is able to “autonomously” create without human intervention.

Why South Africa’s decision received backlash?

• South Africa’s decision to grant patent has received widespread backlash from intellectual property experts which argued that-
• Unlawful: As per the law, the decision was incorrect, as AI lacks the necessary legal standing to qualify as an inventor. 
• Less reliable commission: This approval was simply an oversight on the part of the commission, which has been known in the past to be less than reliable.
• No formal examination in the process: Moreover, this is clearly an indictment of the country’s patent procedures, which currently only consist of a formal examination step.

Road Ahead

• With the patent approval, South Africa wants to increase innovation to solve its socio-economic issues
• Given the policy environment and the vast potential of AI, the granting of the patent makes sense.

About AI

• AI is simply the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs.
• It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence..

AI in India

• The last half decade have witnessed significant uptake of AI-focused innovation in India, with over 4,000 AI patents being filed during the period.
• This is six times higher than the figure for 2011-2015.
• On a global front, India was ranked eighth in the top 10 countries by AI patent families.
• Prior to 2002, the country had no AI-related patent filing.