A few months ago I read an interesting post, which I felt compelled to write about. The post titled “Australian Court determines that an Artificial Intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law” tells exactly what its title denotes. The case in question comes from the drugs industry, which has always been an avid user of the patent system, but one can easily see how the verdict can be applied to many (if not all) patent areas as well.

The article reads:

“In Australia, a first instance decision by Justice Beach of the Federal Court has provided some guidance: pursuant to Thaler v Commissioner of Patents (2021) FCA 879, an AI system can be the named inventor for an Australian patent application, with a person or corporation listed as the applicant for that patent, or a grantee of the patent.” [...] Worldwide, this is the first court decision determining that an AI system can be an inventor for the purposes of patent law.” [...] “The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) each determined that an inventor must be a natural person.”

An appeal process is still ongoing, but this judgment still serves as an important milestone in the anticipated future of artificial intelligence, which bears enough resemblance to traditional human intelligence to demand similar treatment, first as art, and now also as the subject of patents.

I must admit that when I first read this article it seemed to me as a joke, and even a funny one at that. However, as I kept thinking about it, it made more and more sense. The purpose of this post is to take you through my thought process.

Just note that I am not a lawyer, not a patent attorney, and only express an opinion as someone who’s nowhere close to being authoritative on the subject.

On May 12^th, the Biden administration issued an Executive Order that was written to improve the overall security posture of software products that the government buys from the private sector. Recent events, such as the SolarWinds hack, contributed to the realization that such a move is necessary.

This Executive Order is a big deal. Of course, nothing will change overnight, but given the size and complexity of the software industry, as well as the overall culture behind software security (the culture of: “If the customer doesn’t see it — don’t spend money on it”), an Executive Order can probably yield the closest thing to immediate improvement that we could reasonably wish for. The US Government is a very large customer, and all major vendors will elect to comply with its requirements rather than cross it all off their addressable markets.

A lot has been written on how important it is for the government to use its buying power (if not its regulatory power) to drive vendors into shipping more secure products. Product security suffers from what could best be described as a market failure condition, which would call for such regulatory intervention.

To not overly repeat the mainstream media, I would like to focus on one unique aspect of the current Executive Order, and on how it can ignite a new trend that will change product and network security for the better. I’ll discuss true machine-readable security documentation.