Justine Pila (University of Oxford) has posted Inventor (Ownership, Patents) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This entry provides an account of the inventor in patent law. It outlines the existing legal conception of invention in Europe and the United States, framed by the requirement for patent-eligibility, constructions of patent pedagogy and normativity, and contemporary philosophy of technology. It suggests that recent claims of AI-invention represent a ‘constitutional moment’ for patent law, creating a limited opportunity to elaborate existing legal conceptions of invention in ways that embed human values into the capillary constitution of the patent system. The result is a legal conception of invention that aligns closely with the extension theory of technology, and acknowledges more clearly the patent system’s role in the co-production of constitutive elements of the human world, and the consequential importance of locating responsibility for designing inventions with human beings. Among other things, the discussion highlights the significance of patent law as an historical site at which Western societies have tacitly worked through their conceptions of technology.
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Lawrence Solum