Being named as an inventor

Stephen Thaler filed patent applications naming a system called DABUS as the inventor, and filed them in many countries at once, which turned a philosophical question into a series of rulings. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held in August 2022 that an inventor under the Patent Act must be a natural person. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion in December 2023, as did the European Patent Office. None of them said the machine had contributed nothing. They said that inventorship is a status a person holds, carrying the right to be named, to assign, and to be believed about what was conceived and when. Machines already propose molecules and materials nobody had thought of, and this register tracks that. No office will enter a system as the one who invented.