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From: honavar@speedy.WISC.EDU (A Buggy AI Program)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Who owns the output of an AI?
Message-ID: <4631@spool.wisc.edu>
Date: Wed, 11-Nov-87 01:17:30 EST
Article-I.D.: spool.4631
Posted: Wed Nov 11 01:17:30 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Nov-87 07:19:07 EST
References: <1778@svax.cs.cornell.edu>
Sender: news@spool.wisc.edu
Reply-To: honavar@speedy.WISC.EDU (A Buggy AI Program)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 27

In article <1778@svax.cs.cornell.edu> houpt@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Charles (Chuck) Houpt) writes:
>
>property law. The interseting thing is that it has a section dealing with
>intellectual property generated by Artificial Intelligences.
>
>   The law says that the output of an AI is owned by the user running the
>AI, NOT the programmer who designed it.
>
>   Is this fare? Should copywrites go to the user or the programmer? (or to
>the AI :-)? To me the British law seems unfair. If my AI program discovered
>a new high temperature super-conductor, shouldn't I get some profit? The
>user running my program may know nothing about super-conductors, why should
>he get the patent?

	Any such  law that does not call for a full consideration of 
the particulars of each case is bound to be unfair. One may write a 
learning program that draws inferences based on data presented to it -
in other words, it has the potential to discover something significant,
given enough raw data to work on. Let us say, X writes the program and 
sells it to Y. Y runs the program on data he has gathered in some domain, 
superconductivity and the program discoveres a new high temperature 
superconductor. Although the program was written by X, Y was instrumental 
in  getting the observed behavior out of the program by virtue of the 
data he provided to the program.  In this situation, it is not clear 
how the credit for the discovery made by the program should be apportioned
among X, Y, and the program itself. 
each case