November 25, 1999
WHAT'S NEXT; When a Gizmo Can Invent a Gizmo
By ANNE EISENBERG
IF Dr. Frankenstein's monster had published a best seller, who would
have gotten the rights to that intellectual property?
His inventor up in the castle, of course.
Tough luck for the monster, but these are still early days for
intellectual property rights for thinking machines. No one has
seriously proposed that a computer should receive a share of the
profits from an invention -- at least not yet. But other problems
related to the owner****p of items invented by computers are already
being debated in preparation for the time, probably in about 10 years,
when such inventions will be commonplace, said David E. Goldberg, an
engineer and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign.
Computers are already making inroads in the area of intellectual
property as they design antennas, gas turbines and integrated
circuits. Much of the work in this field of automatic discovery is
preliminary and a lot of it is proprietary and therefore secret, but
what can be seen provides tantalizing glimpses of a future in which
computers work day and night -- no breaks for lunch -- to come up with
original solutions with very little help from their programmers.
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