UK Law Rejects AI Inventors While Copyright Questions Linger
The U.K. government keeps existing copyright and patent laws unchanged, meaning AI systems like DABUS cannot legally be named as inventors. Complex questions about AI authorship and joint authorship in creative works remain unresolved for developers and artists.
Artificial intelligence is expanding rapidly into everyday technology, prompting the U.K. government to maintain its current intellectual property laws without immediate changes. This decision means that computer-generated works keep their existing copyright protections, and the law continues to require human involvement for both copyright authorship and patent inventorship.
Recent high-profile court cases highlight the strict human requirement for patents, as multiple jurisdictions reject the AI system DABUS as a valid inventor. Under the U.K. Patents Act, only a human deviser can be named as an inventor, a rule consistently upheld by the U.K. Court of Appeal and echoed by similar rulings in Australia and Europe.
While patent law firmly rejects AI inventorship, copyright law under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act presents different challenges for literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works. Programmers and creators currently navigate unresolved questions regarding how courts will handle AI authorship and joint authorship between humans and machines as these technologies continuously evolve.