Innovating with AI: Ensuring You Own Your Inventions


2 minute watch | October.30.2024

When you're thinking about using AI to develop your company's technology, there are two primary areas that I like to think about.

First is ownership. Currently, under U.S. law, the outputs of artificial intelligence are not protected under either copyright or patent. This means you need a human contribution. In a copyright context, that means the human is providing creative material, storyboarding, architecture of software, design elements, and things along those lines. In a patent context, it means that the human is contributing to the conception of the invention. It's important for a company to think about how it's going to document those human contributions.

You want to think about enforcement later on. How are you going to prove, if you need to enforce your intellectual property, that specific portions were developed by human beings, what the human contribution was, and what you were able to claim ownership on? Claiming ownership on those portions is what's going to drive your claim, entitle you to damages or an injunction, and give you the ability to enforce your intellectual property rights.

The second thing to think about is where these tools are being deployed. Is it proprietary technology? Is it something where you're going to get a competitive edge? Is it something you're developing that's going to box your competitors out and really drive company growth? You want to be much more sensitive when deploying AI tools to develop that kind of technology. Peripheral uses like testing, debugging, or producing marketing materials, where you're not going to assert an intellectual property right, are much less sensitive, and you can probably be a little bit more liberal in how you deploy the tools. But at the end of the day, any deployment of artificial intelligence within a company should be done with at least some consideration of how the law interplays with the use of that tool.