Patently artificial

The implications of a landmark legal ruling allowing AI-generated inventions to be patented in Australia

If a landmark ruling in Australia’s Federal Court is anything to go by, the classic trope of the whacky inventor holed up in the garage working on ways to bend the time-space continuum may be under threat. It is the first shot in a legal tussle that experts warn is a taste of things to come for Australia’s research community.

In late July the Federal Court set a ground-breaking precedent by flipping a fundamental assumption on its head: the idea that only human beings have the capacity to invent things.