Background
Stephen Thaler filed European patent applications naming DABUS as inventor. The EPO Receiving Section refused the applications, and the Legal Board of Appeal upheld the refusal, holding that the European Patent Convention requires the inventor to be a person with legal capacity.
AI interaction
‘Under the EPC the inventor designated in the application has to be a person with legal capacity.’ The ruling confirmed that only humans can be inventors under the EPC, keeping AI systems outside the scope of European patent law.
Note: DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Science) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler. Thaler pursued parallel test cases worldwide, naming DABUS as inventor to challenge the limits of patent law. Courts and offices in the UK, EPO, Australia and USA all reached the same outcome: only humans can be inventors under current law.