Challenges of IP Law In The Era of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Artificial intelligence continues to expand into more aspects of human life on a weekly basis. The field is no longer confined to chess-playing robots or speech-recognition software; AI is now learning to drive, paint, and even discover and test new drugs.
In this new world, who owns these technologies? And who owns the work they create?
AI and Intellectual Property (IP) Issues
Intellectual property law, or IP law, covers the intangible market of inventions, ideas, and creative work. Copyrights and patents grant the originators of new concepts certain market protections to reward innovation and make it easier for inventors to realize their work.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, this has not been an issue of note until recently. Artificial intelligence can be traced back to ca. 1955 when Simon & Newell’s “Logic Theorist” program attempted to emulate human problem-solving. Many advances in AI were treated as open-source, with no one copyrighting their work and most machine learning being treated as scientific endeavors instead of marketable products.
Nowadays, many artificial intelligence programs and applications have been patented, and some source code is licensable under copyright. Companies can file patents based on the utility of their artificial intelligence programs, and for its different functions. The same visual identification artificial intelligence program could be patented in one instance as a tool to flag graphic content on social media, and in another as a way to identify disease flags in patient's ultrasounds.
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