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In Episode 150 Rosalind English talks to Professor Ryan Abbott about the recent ruling in the Court of Appeal on whether an invention made by Artificial Intelligence without a traditional human inventor is entitled to a patent. The Court (with one of the judges dissenting) said no.
Ryan Abbott is the author of The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law published last year and he has published widely on issues associated with law and technology, health law, and intellectual property in leading legal, medical, and scientific books and journals. He is also a licensed physician, attorney, and acupuncturist in the United States, as well as a solicitor advocate in England and Wales.
He is also architect of this important test case. We discuss the obstacles faced by the inventor of an AI set out in the Patents Act 1977 and speculate whether there needs to be a root and branch review of patent eligibility, given that so many inventions are produced by AI across the world.
Henrietta Lacks was a young Black woman who in 1951 was diagnosed with a particularly agressive form of cervical cancer. Her treating doctors at the Johns Hopkins hospital took a sample from the tumour and that was the birth of “HeLa” – an “immortal” line of fast-replicating cells that have been reproduced every since, used in scientific and medical innovations including the development of the polio vaccine, infertility research and even the early research into a vaccine against Covid19. The HeLa cell line was in essence the first time human cells could be successfully cloned and it has been in use continually for research that has touched nearly every realm of medicine.
In October 2021, her estate filed suit against Thermo Fisher, the pharmaceutical company that bought the cells from the hospital. Her family, represented by Ben Crump, the attorney who represented the family of George Floyd in 2020, is asking the company to pay back the full profits gained over 70 years of using her cells without consent. This is the US remedy of “disgorgement of profits”, which essentially involves the transfer of all the company’s patents and profits from the HeLa line to the Lacks estate. In essence, disgorgement removes the incentive to unjustly enrich yourself at another’s expense.
The problem with this remedy is it is dependent on the enrichment being based on the other person’s property. In US law, as in the UK, there is no property in the body. In fact US law is silent on ownership of bodily resources. The only statute that governs this subject is the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act which bans the sale of all organs including kidneys. The ban only extends to the sale of kidneys for transplantation; there is no ban on the sale of kidneys for research and experimentation.
The Court of Appeal has ruled that an artificial intelligence machine cannot qualify as an “inventor” for the purposes of Sections 7 and 13 of the Patents Act because it is not a person. Further, in determining whether a person had the right to apply for a patent under Section 7(2)(b), there was no rule of law that new intangible property produced by existing tangible property was the property of the owner of the tangible property, and certainly no rule that property in an invention created by a machine was owned by the owner of the machine.
Background Facts and Law
This was an appeal by the owner of an artificial intelligence machine against a decision upholding the respondent Comptroller’s refusal of his patent applications in respect of inventions generated by the machine.The appellant had submitted two patent applications designating an artificial intelligence machine (DABUS), as the inventor. DABUS stands for “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”, an artificial neural system owned by Dr Thaler. The first invention was entitled “Food Container” and concerned the shape of parts of packaging for food. The second was entitled “Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention”, and was a form of flashing light. On the face of it each disclosed a potentially patentable invention, that is to say patentable as defined by s1 of the 1977 Act. The appellant owned the machine, but had also created it and set it up to produce the inventions in issue. In response to the box requiring him to indicate how he had the right to be granted a patent, he wrote: “by ownership of the creativity machine ‘DABUS'”. The Intellectual Property Office indicated that the statement of inventorship form did not satisfy the Patents Act 1977 Pt I s.13(2), which required him to identify a person as the inventor (section 13 (2) (a) and to indicate how he had derived his right to be granted the patent (section 13(2) (b)). It therefore determined that the applications were deemed to be withdrawn. The applicant was still not entitled to apply for a patent simply by virtue of ownership of DABUS, because a satisfactory derivation of right had not been provided (as machine cannot pass on ownership). The High Court upheld that decision. First, it considered Section 7, which sets out the circumstances in which a person might right to apply and obtain a patent, and found that its natural meaning was that the inventor was a person. Second, it found that although the appellant could perhaps have claimed a right to be granted a patent as the inventor under Section 7(2)(a), he had not advanced such a case. Third, it found that an applicant’s subjective and honest belief that they were entitled to apply for a patent was insufficient to entitle them to the grant of a patent as that would render the provisions of s.7 otiose.
Law Pod UK returns after the summer break with Episode 149: a fascinating interview with Special Advocate Angus McCullough QC on Closed Material Proceedings where evidence is so secretive the SAs cannot communicate directly with their clients. Anyone interested in drilling further down into the subject please go to Angus’s two posts on UKHRB: “Secret Justice”: An Oxymoron and the Overdue Review” and “Secret Justice – The Insiders’ View”, with links to the evolution of CMPs, the relevant legislation, the review process now under way and the submissions that Special Advocates have made to Sir Duncan Ouseley, the independent reviewer of this process: The Ouseley Review – SAs-Submission.
And you will notice a few changes: different signature tune, different voiceover: our very own head of Chambers, Richard Booth QC. Also welcome to our new producer Philip at lawpodcasts.co.uk, who’s done a great job taking over the task of delivering this podcast from Simon Jarvis of Whistledown.
We have a terrific line up of guests following Angus for the Autumn.
These are the words that Hayden J, Vice President of the Court of Protection, used to describe AH, the applicant in this case. The Official Solicitor identified it as “the most troubling and tragic of cases of this kind” with which she has been involved.
This case is the most recent and cogent in the consideration of best interests under the Mental Capacity Act in terms of continuing life-saving treatment. The “best interests” test is laid out in Aintree University Hospital NHS Trust v James [2013] UKSC 67.
AH’s family was originally from Pakistan. She and her family moved to Uganda but they were expelled, as South Asian residents, under the Idi Amin regime, in the early 1970’s. AH’s medical history showed signs of non-specific arthralgia, raised calcium levels and Type 2 diabetes. She had been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. She did not smoke, nor did she drink alcohol.
In early January 2020 she suffered a high fever which her doctors identified symptomatic and not causative of the cytokine/autoimmune ‘storm’ which created the “devastating” neurological damage and the pathological processes she has suffered from since. Both her treating doctors had seen similar cytokine ‘storms’ in patients critically ill with Covid-19 although neither has seen damage as extensive as that sustained by the applicant. All agreed that it was in consequence of this ‘storm’ that there had been such “extensive damage” to the nerves and to the muscle as well as to the brain.
I have posted on the extraordinary goings-on in Thuringen, Germany where two Weimar judges, one family and one administrative, have been subject to searches by the public prosecutor’s office following their respective rulings containing comments critical of the various lockdown and testing measures during the C-19 pandemic. You can find my posts here, here and here.
So it’s something of an irony that, whilst a leading member state of the European Union is going after its judges for rulings of which it disapproves, the European Commission lodges an application for interim measures under Article 279 TFEU and Article 160(2) of the Rules of Procedure, requesting that the European Court of Justice order the Republic of Poland to suspend various Polish laws concerning disciplinary cases against judges. As the ECJ said, when considering the request,
The European Union is composed of States which have freely and voluntarily committed themselves to the common values referred to in Article 2 TEU, which respect those values and which undertake to promote them. In particular, it follows from Article 2 TEU that the European Union is founded on values, such as the rule of law, which are common to the Member States in a society in which, inter alia, justice prevails.
Fine words, indeed. But the aspiration needs some enforcement. On the 15th of July the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the moves by the Polish government to institute a “Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court” interfered with the guarantees of impartiality and independence of the judiciary, as well as the protection of the judiciary from executive disciplinary action, was in breach of EU law (Case C‑791/19, action for failure to fulfil obligations under Article 258 TFEU).
The Federal Court of Justice in Germany (the Bundesgerichtshof, or BGH) has ruled against the social network provider that deleted posts and suspended accounts amid allegations of “hate speech”.
The ruling was handed down on the 29th of July (Bundesgerichtshof, Urteile vom 29. Juli 2021 – III ZR 179/20 und III ZR 192/20) and at the time of writing this post, the full judgment had not been published. The following summary is based upon the Bundesgerichtshof’s press release. NB the quotes from the plaintiff’s Facebook entries are in the judgment, i.e. the public domain, in other words no offence is intended by repeating them here.
Judgments of July 29, 2021 – III ZR 179/20 and III ZR 192/20
The III Civil Senate of the German Federal Court of Justice has ruled that Facebook’s terms and conditions of April 19, 2018 for the deletion of user posts and account blocking in the event of violations of the communication standards set out in the terms and conditions are invalid. This was because the defendant provider had not undertaken to inform the user about the removal of his post at least subsequently and about an intended blocking of his user account in advance, had not informed them of the reason for this and had not given them an opportunity to respond with a subsequent new decision. If, due to the invalid terms and conditions of the provider’s contract, a user’s contribution was deleted and their account temporarily subject to a partial blocking, the user should be able to claim the activation of the deleted contribution and, an undertaking that there would be no further account blocking or deletion of the contribution upon its renewed posting.
Background facts
The parties disputed the legality of a temporary partial blocking of the plaintiffs’ Facebook user accounts and the deletion of their comments by the defendant.
The plaintiffs each maintained a user account for a worldwide social network operated by the defendant’s parent company, whose provider and contractual partner for users based in Germany was the defendant. They claimed against the defendant – to the extent still relevant for the appeal proceedings – in respect of activation of the posts published by them on the network and deleted by the defendant, for an injunction against renewed blocking of their user accounts and deletion of their posts, and – in one of the appeal proceedings – for information about a company commissioned to implement the account blocking.
The ability to make interim care orders under s.38 Children Act 1989 is one of the family court’s most significant powers. With newborn babies, prompt action is not only desirable, it’s essential. But not so easy to achieve in practice, as you will hear from our lively and comprehensive conversation.
This episode will be the last before we take our August break, but plans for Law Pod UK from September are already being hatched so remember to tune in!
The focus of this judgment was on the jurisdiction, if any, that the High Court Family Division has to maintain a Reporting Restriction Order (‘RRO’) prohibiting the naming of any medical clinicians as being involved in the care and treatment of a child who had been the subject of “end of life” proceedings before the High Court prior to their death, and where an RRO had been made at that time preventing the identification of any of the treating clinicians and staff until further order.
Each of the children, Zainab Abbasi and Isaiah Haastrup, had been the subject of end of life proceedings under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court, in which the issue was whether life-support should be withdrawn from them. Each of the two children died; Zainab Abbasi dying after the issue of proceedings but before the court could conduct a substantive adjudication, and Isaiah Haastrup dying following the removal of life-sustaining ventilation at the conclusion of a full legal process including an application to the Court of Appeal. In both cases, widely drawn RROs were made during the proceedings.
The offence of “Rechtsbeugung” in German law is not easy to translate. The best match we have for it in English is the offence of “misconduct in public office”. Misfeasance in public office, according to Archibold, is committed by
(a) a public officer acting as such who
(b) wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself
(c) to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder,
(d) without reasonable justification.
I have not been able to find any examples of judges being prosecuted for misconduct in public office in this country. However, this past fortnight in Germany, no less than eight searches have been carried out in the homes of judges, their expert witnesses, a guardian ad litem and others associated with a controversial ruling regarding Covid-19 restrictions. I posted on Judge Christian Dettmar’s ruling in early April and subsequent investigation here. Reminder: Judge Dettmar issued an injunction against two schools in Weimar to stop them imposing masking, social distancing and testing. This was in his view necessary in order to avert (further) compromising of children’s welfare.
Over ten years ago I posted on the wasteful prohibition under the EU Animal By-Product Regulation on feeding meat and bone meal – waste from slaughterhouses – to omnivorous farm animals, poultry and pigs. See Pigswill and public health: a load of EU Bull, 7 January 2011. While this regulation has been in force the protein needed by these fast growing animals has had to come from expensive soybeans, imported from South America where hundreds of miles of rainforests have been laid waste to make room for the soy crop. As you will remember from that post, the ban was introduced following the BSE crisis, itself a possibly predictable consequence of feeding spinal tissue to vegetarian ruminants.
This ban extended to anyone feeding food scraps to farmed animals, no matter how small the operation and how innocent the scraps. As I said in my last post,
Anyone with a few hens pecking away in the backyard needs to look sharp: a “farmed animal” for the purpose of the Regulation means any animal kept for the provision of food, and a couple of eggs a week may bring a Defra van trundling up the drive at any moment.
And in 2004 our very own Prime Minister, then MP for Henley, reported that in his constituency a hotel
must now pay an extra £1,000 a year to a licensed collector, whose responsibility it is to remove wet waste that previously went to a pigswill feeder. Given that there is room for only three years’ waste in our landfill sites, that is not the cleanest and greenest solution. It is estimated that the ban on swill feeding is generating an extra 1.7 million tonnes of waste per year, and that which does not fill up our landfill sites must be going down our drains, clogging up the sewers and attracting vermin
Finally it seems to have dawned on the EU Commission that this is a very un-green piece of legislation in an era where the EU obliges its member states by draconian legislation to recycle, limit landfill, restrict incineration, cut down on carbon emissions and save energy.
Alta Fixsler was born with catastrophic brain injury. She now two years old, currently a patient at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital Paediatric Intensive Care Unit on intensive life sustaining treatment. In this case the court was asked to decide whether it would be in Alta’s best interests for that life-sustaining treatment to be continued. The inevitable consequence of it being discontinued will be the death of Alta.
The parents are Chassidic Practising Jews and Israeli citizens. They emphasised the fact that being devout members of the Jewish faith meant that their faith was not simply a religion but also a way of life. Within this context, the parents took detailed rabbinical advice as to their religious duties and obligations in the context of Alta’s medical situation. They opposed the application brought by the NHS Trust and instead sought to take Alta to Israel for continued treatment and the exploration of long-term ventilation at home in Israel in due course or, if the court concluded that it is in Alta’s best interests for life sustaining treatment to be withdrawn, for that step to be taken in Israel.
A declaration pursuant to the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court that it is not in the best interests of Alta for life-sustaining medical treatment to be continued, and that is it in her best interests for a palliative care regime to be implemented;
A specific issue order under section 8 of the Children Act 1989 determining that life-sustaining medical treatment should cease to be provided and a palliative care regime implemented instead.
On 28th of April I wrote up a judgment by Weimar District Court Judge Dettmar against masks and social distancing in schools, and his subsequent handling by the police and District Prosecutor. Judge Dettmar’s decision of the 8th of April was overturned last week and the proceedings were discontinued.
The same court had produced a similar judgment ( 6 OWi 583 Js 200030/21) in a “Corona trial” on the 15th of March 2021 published on the 6th of May 2021. This was a ruling from a judge with a different jurisdiction in the same court. Judge Güricke, unlike Judge Dettmar, is not a family judge. Part of his jurisdiction concerns the validity of subordinate legislation, particularly ordinances banning certain behaviour, on pain of a fine or even a prison sentence. All administrative offences that are not traffic offences fall into this jurisdiction; and the Corona fine cases fall into the Special Administrative Offences division of which Judge Güricke is part. This, his latest judgment, examines in great depth what the government actually knew and should have known about the situation prevailing when the government decided on lockdown in March 2020.
It is well worth reading. Despite the fact that the German media has barely picked up on it, it is being commented upon and read in legal circles.
Judge Güricke’s ruling on the constitutional point is final. The public prosecutor’s office have not been able to appeal because the Thuringian Constitutional Court handed down a ruling on 1 March 2021 that all Thuringian Corona decrees, starting with the first one issued in March 2020 until the beginning of June 2020, were unlawful and null and void due to an error in formalities.
The claimant YZ had been acquitted on three counts raping his former wife but details concerning these matters remain on the Police National Computer (PNC). These proceedings concerned whether such retention was lawful.
The question at the heart of this application was whether onus was on the competent authority to justify its processing of the claimant’s dat was lawful and fair under the Data Protection Act 2018. The claimant’s argument was that the relevant guidance (issued pursuant to the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act) to the police was not compatible with this statutory requirement as it put the onus on an applicant for deletion to give reasons for that deletion [para 40].
Clare Ciborowska and Richard Ager join Rosalind English in the first of a series of discussions from the family law team at 1 Crown Office Row in Brighton, highlighting developments and analysing case law from the family courts.
In Episode 144 of Law Pod UK, we focus on the challenges presented to family court judges by the obligation to conduct full fact finding hearings where allegations of domestic abuse are raised. The details of this duty are to be found in Practice Direction 12J FPR2010, but the difficulties have yet to be played out in practice. There are problems with the overlap between criminal and family law, with the lack of legal aid for defendants, and, above all, the difficulties faced by judges tasked with the business of trying to run an in inquisitorial hearing whilst being as supportive as possible to litigants in person.
Clare and Richard talk about the various issues arising out of the practice direction and the case law that preceded and followed PDJ12. Here, as promised, are the citations and references touched upon in the podcast:
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