In our Global IP Outlook for 2018 we flagged the following key areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to consider for developments over the year. This post collates our related LimeGreen IP insights… and then some. Keep an eye out for our Global IP Outlook 2019 in the new year!

• As existing law and court decisions appear to rule out a machine or program being an inventor, the question of ownership of AI inventions could leave many contributors to the development of an AI system tussling for rights.
  • Imogen Ireland reported on EU Patent Office’s preview of guidelines on patenting AI applications . Imogen also reviewed AI’s impact on the pharma industry in areas such as drug discovery, tech collaboration, regulation and patentability and published a related article in published in Intellectual Property Magazine.
  • We published a translation of Marie-Aimée de Dampierre’s report on intellectual property challenges posed by artificial intelligence in the online summer edition of Les Echos Executives

• As an AI system learns and modifies its external behaviors, it is possible that a resulting product or process might infringe one or more patent claims.
  • We published a guide to  AI and your business with a chapter dedicated to IP issues including; ownership of patents, copyright and trade secrets; Ownership of data and infringement challenges

• The gathering of information for enabling the AI to learn over time is giving rise to various global privacy and data export concerns.
  • Jason Lohr examined the legal landmines lie in wait for machine learning applications
  • Nils Rauer picked out the relevant areas of the draft EU Copyright Directive on text and data mining

• The adoption of AI provides the ability to obtain unprecedented types of information and predictions about competitor activity and plans, which also means that companies must reassess their security and confidentiality policies to minimize similar analysis of their activity and plans.
  •  Zenas J. Choi and Cullen G. Taylor discussed Data commercialisation strategy: A drill-down, with Financier Worldwide

In addition to these predicted developments, our 2018 Brand Benchmarking survey highlighted that 93% of respondents believe that AI will have a positive influence: saving them time and money.

Julia Anne Matheson and Helen Xia discussed the use of AI in national/international design searches to make the process more economical and practical in their interview with James Nurton. In a similar vein, we summarized the 6th Hamburg Legal Tech Meetup which explored new ways of adapting AI and machine learning legal services to digitalization by further enhancing interdisciplinary and inter-industry exchange in the field of legal tech.

In the field of copyright, Nils Rauer also discussed the limitations of AI for technical filtering and separation of illegal content from legitimate content in connection with the copyright dispute over YouTube before the German Federal Court of Justice.

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