AI: Protecting Inventions in China, Europe and the U.S.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting massive investment and AI systems seem certain to become further embedded in many industries, as well as into daily life around the world. How to best protect these inventions is a complicated issue that is playing out differently around the globe.

This webinar will address how to approach the challenge of obtaining AI patent protection in three major jurisdictions, as well considering when the alternative of trade secret protection could be a better course to take.  Various litigation scenarios will also be considered, including the ongoing dispute in China between Zhizhen Network Technology and Apple that relates to Apple's Siri voice assistant app.

Protecting AI inventions is not easy even when inventors and prosecutors only focus on just one set of national requirements. Experts say that to write an AI patent application it is useful to know the basics of feature engineering, gradient-descent training, genetic-algorithm training, and multi-batch techniques for organizing training data. Patents must be prepared taking into consideration both the possibility of infringement being difficult to detect ‒ and who will be considered the infringer. With AI inventions, there might be more players involved than you expect.

Our panelists include in-house AI patent experts (one at a Chinese tech company and the other at a U.S. tech company), as well as an experienced German patent prosecutor. They will, among other things, use claim sets for actual AI inventions to compare and contrast patent law and practice among the three jurisdictions in two key areas for AI:

• Patent eligibility, including the impact of the new USPTO guidelines put forth in January, and
• Written description, enablement, and functional claiming.

Speakers:  

• Jessica Meyers, Microsoft
• Andreas Holzwarth-Rochford, Jones Day
• Roger Shang, Alibaba