Artificial Intelligence and Patent Ownership

Invention by artificial intelligence (AI) is the future of innovation. Unfortunately, as discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests, the U.S. patent regime has yet to determine how it will address patents for inventions created solely by AI (AI patents). This Article fills that void by presenting the first comprehensive analysis on the allocation of patent rights arising from invention by AI. To this end, this Article employs Coase Theorem and its corollaries to determine who should be allowed to secure these patents to maximize economic efficiency. The study concludes that letting firms using AI to create new technologies (as opposed to software companies, programmers, or downstream parties) to obtain the resulting patents is the optimal policy

Cannabis Derivatives and Trademark Registration: The Case of Delta-8-THC

The legal environment surrounding the cannabis industry is ambiguous and constantly changing. While cannabis is prohibited under federal law, a 2018 statute legalized a variant of the cannabis plant (“hemp”) that is low in its most common intoxicating agents. Recognizing this, entrepreneurs began to process hemp to extract and sell chemicals contained therein. Included in this trend is the extraction of Delta-8 Tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ8-THC)—a psychoactive drug with an increasing market presence in states where most cannabis (e.g., “marijuana”) is illegal. As competition in the Δ8-THC field emerged, firms sought to distinguish their wares through brand recognition and federal trademark registration. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refuses to register these marks—arguing that Δ8- THC does not satisfy the requirement that products be used “in legal commerce.” On this point, the USPTO interprets relevant law as criminalizing the sale of Δ8- THC. That conclusion stands in contrast to determinations reached by the Drug Enforcement Agency and federal courts. This Article addresses the propriety of federal registration of Δ8-THC trademarks. It critically analyzes the intersection of federal drug law, hemp’s legalization, and administrative regulations to answer the question. Based on this research, a strong case for the registration of Δ8-THC marks1 arises. This conclusion has public and private importance. To seek registration of a Δ8-THC mark, applicants must aver that they use it in commerce. This could amount to admitting to the sale of an illegal drug—depending on the interpretation of somewhat ambiguous regulations. With this in mind, a law and strategy analysis is employed to explain why firms take that risk to seek trademark registration. On this issue, the Article identifies specific current market advantages and future strategic gains that warrant this exposure. Further, public benefits of Δ8-THC registration are explored. A current concern in this largely unregulated market is the presence of harmful impurities in goods sold for human consumption. This issue can be mitigated by aligning the public interest in safe products with private financial incentives. Specifically, the ability to maintain strong trademark rights encourages the creation of goodwill through the sale of quality products. Recognizing this, firms are encouraged to reduce impurities in their Δ8-THC wares under the belief that this will benefit their reputation and thus increase sales

Information Theory and Patent Documents

Recent scholarship has expanded the scope of analytical tools available to patent law researchers. The foundation of information theory published by Claude Shannon has been applied to textual analysis to determine the similarities of patents and to assess a patent’s value. This article presents a theoretical application of information theory to quantify lexical ambiguity and originality in innovation within patent law

Patent Inequality

Using an original dataset of over 1,000,000 patents and empirical methods, we find that the patent system perpetuates inequalities between powerful and upstart firms. When faced with growing numbers of patents in a field, upstart inventors reduce research and development expenditures, while those already holding many patents increase their innovation efforts. This phenomenon affords entrenched firms disproportionate opportunities to innovate as well as utilize the resulting patents to create barriers to entry (e.g., licensing costs or potential litigation).A hallmark of this type of behavior is securing large patent holdings to create competitive advantages associated with the size of the portfolio, regardless of the value of the underlying patents. Indeed, this strategy relies on quantity, not quality. Using a variety of models, we first find evidence that this strategy is commonplace in innovative markets. Our analysis then determines that innovation suffers when firms amass many low-value patents to exclude upstart inventors. From these results, we not only provide answers to a contentious debate about the effects of strategic patenting, but also suggest remedial policies to foster competition and innovation

The Gender Gap in Academic Patenting

The gender gap in academia has long been the focus of public discourse regarding the role of universities in promoting social values. In this study, we consider women’s participation in transferring knowledge from the academy to industry. A prominent model for such transfer is reflected in patent registration for inventions developed through scholarly research. And while academic patenting is a significant component of the professional activities of many faculty members, the extent to which women’s scientific discoveries are patented and commercialized has received relatively little attention. The U.S. academy is a leader in science and a pioneer of technology transfer. This study analyzes the extent to which inventions by academic women are protected by university patents. Through analysis of inventors’ names, we ascertain the expected gender of inventors listed on applications filed by U.S. academic institutions. From this data, we report the extent to which a gender gap exists in patent application, grant rates, fields of research, and forward citations. Our study yielded several key findings. First, we found a significant increase in the number of patent applications originating from universities from 2000 to 2015. We identified a similar increase in applications by inventor teams made up of only women, though these applications were granted at a lower rate and were cited less frequently than patents obtained by teams including men. We found differences in team composition, with women being much more likely to work alone than men. We also noted an interesting disparity in subject matter, with drugs and chemistry (especially molecular biology) dominating the technological fields of university applications. The Article concludes that while women increasingly participate in academic patenting, a significant gender gap persists. Our findings may serve as a springboard for further research on the reasons for the failure to achieve gender equality, as women’s representation in the academy continues to increase

Identification of the Microlens in Event MACHO-LMC-20

We report on the identification of the lens responsible for microlensing event MACHO-LMC-20. As part of a \textit{Spitzer}/IRAC program conducting mid-infrared follow-up of the MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud microlensing fields, we discovered a significant flux excess at the position of the source star for this event. These data, in combination with high resolution near-infrared \textit{Magellan}/PANIC data has allowed us to classify the lens as an early M dwarf in the thick disk of the Milky Way, at a distance of $\sim 2$ kpc. This is only the second microlens to have been identified, the first also being a M dwarf star in the disk. Together, these two events are still consistent with the expected frequency of nearby stars in the Milky Way thin and thick disks acting as lenses.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to ApJ Letter

Photonic Passbands and Zeropoints for the Stromgren uvby system

Photonic passbands have been derived for the uvby standard system by convolving the original filter passbands of Str\"omgren and Perry with atmospheric extinction and the QE of a cooled 1P21 photomultiplier tube. Using these new passbands, synthetic photometry was calculated for all the stars in the extensive NGSL and MILES spectrophotometric libraries and compared with the homogenised b-y, m1 and c1 indices in the Hauck-Mermilliod 1998 catalog and the derived u - v and v - b colors. Excellent agreement between observed and synthetic photometry was achieved with regression slopes near unity. Slightly better fits were obtained by considering stars with b-y 0.5, separately. It is recommended that these new passbands be used together with the provided transformation equations to generate synthetic photometry from model atmosphere fluxes and observed spectrophotometry. Synthetic photometry was also carried out using the natural system of the 4-channel spectrograph-photometers and those of Cousins and Eggen in order to explore the systematic dfferences that could be expected between their instrumental systems and the standard system.Comment: 15 pages, including 10 figure

The PdBI Arcsecond Whirlpool Survey (PAWS). I. A Cloud-Scale/Multi-Wavelength View of the Interstellar Medium in a Grand-Design Spiral Galaxy

The PdBI (Plateau de Bure Interferometer) Arcsecond Whirlpool Survey (PAWS) has mapped the molecular gas in the central ~9kpc of M51 in its 12CO(1-0) line emission at cloud-scale resolution of ~40pc using both IRAM telescopes. We utilize this dataset to quantitatively characterize the relation of molecular gas (or CO emission) to other tracers of the interstellar medium (ISM), star formation and stellar populations of varying ages. Using 2-dimensional maps, a polar cross-correlation technique and pixel-by-pixel diagrams, we find: (a) that (as expected) the distribution of the molecular gas can be linked to different components of the gravitational potential, (b) evidence for a physical link between CO line emission and radio continuum that seems not to be caused by massive stars, but rather depend on the gas density, (c) a close spatial relation between the PAH and molecular gas emission, but no predictive power of PAH emission for the molecular gas mass,(d) that the I-H color map is an excellent predictor of the distribution (and to a lesser degree the brightness) of CO emission, and (e) that the impact of massive (UV-intense) young star-forming regions on the bulk of the molecular gas in central ~9kpc can not be significant due to a complex spatial relation between molecular gas and star-forming regions that ranges from co-spatial to spatially offset to absent. The last point, in particular, highlights the importance of galactic environment -- and thus the underlying gravitational potential -- for the distribution of molecular gas and star formation.Comment: 52 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables, (several minor typos corrected) accepted by ApJ, high resolution version available, see http://www.mpia.de/PAWS/pub/paws_schinnerer.pdf ; for more information on PAWS, further papers and the data, see http://www.mpia.de/PAW