Stephen Thaler is filing junk patents in his own name, naming his software as the “inventor,” and challenging the various patent offices when they reject his defective application form without examining its merits. As the dissenting judge said in the Court of Appeal, “if only Dr Thaler was not such an obsessive and, instead of calling DABUS the inventor, he named himself … none of these problems would arise” [1].

Thaler recently won the same argument in Australia [2], although an appeal is pending. His lapsed patent application (2019363177) can be found in IP Australia’s online database [3]. Putting the legal question aside – whether Thaler’s insistence on naming DABUS the inventor was fatally defective to the application – the patent application is pseudoscientific nonsense, not a sound basis for deep questions about the nature of ownership and invention.

The patent claims two apparently unrelated inventions. It does not explain how they were identified by DABUS or identify any other connection between them. The first invention is a “food or beverage container” with the cross-section of a Koch snowflake, which supposedly allows for containers to stick to each other. The material used for this flexible, fractal surface is unspecified, but plastic, metal or “an elastomeric material” are suggested, along with “potentially flexible food product (for example pasta, dough, liquorice and so on.” It is plausible that the text of this claim was generated by GPT-3.

The second invention is a “neural-flame device for attracting enhanced attention,” that is, an LED that blinks “at a frequency corresponding to approximately 4 Hz and a fractal dimension near ½.” There is extensive citation of Thaler’s own publications, none of which are in reputable peer-reviewed journals. What can be found online [4] fails to show that flickering LEDs have some useful neurological function, or explain what the patent application has to do with DABUS.

[1]: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2021/1374.pdf

[2]: https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fc...

[3]: http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDet...

[4]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705091...