Tech Policy

Washington takes on AI inventorship and the Wild West of crypto

Get caught up on what’s been going on in the world of tech policy.
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Francis Scialabba

· 4 min read

This week’s policy news is heavy on everyone’s favorite topic: crypto. Legislators hashed out concerns about how to regulate digital currencies, plus how to out-blockchain China. And the Senate Judiciary heard from yet another panel of AI experts, this time about whether and how to patents should credit AI. Here’s our roundup of news from the intersection of tech and politics:

Crypto woes abound: It’s been a busy few weeks in the crypto world. Two House Republicans released a “discussion draft” of proposed legislation that would attempt to create a framework for regulation in the industry, which, to date, has been largely unsuccessful.

The as-yet-unnamed draft bill would create processes for digital assets and exchanges to be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). For investment contracts containing digital assets, the SEC would be in control. For digital assets that check all the boxes to be a commodity, the CFTC would take the lead. “Whether or not an asset is a commodity would depend largely on whether a blockchain network is decentralized,” Bloomberg reported.

The “is a given digital asset a security or a commodity?” conundrum has been a point of contention, as the crypto industry has generally tried to argue that cryptocurrencies shouldn’t be considered securities, and therefore shouldn’t be regulated by the SEC.

In an ironic twist, the joint committee hearing took place against the backdrop of two back-to-back SEC lawsuits filed against two of the largest crypto exchanges, Binance and Coinbase, alleging the mishandling of customer money and failure to register as a securities exchange, respectively.

Blockchain, baby: The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing on the “new opportunities and applications” presented by blockchain technology, and the potential security threats that could arise if China leads development and deployment in the field.

The subcommittee heard testimony from a range of experts who primarily advocated for non-crypto use cases and encouraged regulation. Ryan Wyatt, former YouTube gaming exec and current president of Polygon Labs, described blockchains as an alternative foundation for the internet, one controlled by users rather than large, centralized technology companies:

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“[Blockchains] democratize the internet, correct the value extraction problem, and make the web read, write, and own—the next generation of the internet, referred to as Web3,” Wyatt said.

Wyatt pointed to current use cases ranging from Nike’s Dot Swoosh program to applications of the technology by Coca-Cola, Unicef, and the Department of Defense.

And now, back to AI: The Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held the first in a series of hearings about AI and IP law, with testimony from across academia and the corporate world.

Current law, as recently interpreted by a federal appeals court, requires inventors listed on patent applications to be humans, preventing AI from being named. Witnesses on Wednesday argued for a change that would let human inventors patent inventions made using AI, attributing the person and not the AI system.

“We must ensure that the doctrine of inventorship law known as conception, which traditionally considers whether an invention occurred inside the mind of the inventor, is not applied too rigidly to deprive human inventors of patent rights, simply because generative AI now allows some of the inventive process to occur in silico or on a computer,” Corey Salsberg, Novartis’s VP and global head of IP affairs, told the committee.

Ryan Abbott, a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law, brought a prop in the form of a 3D-printed version of an AI-generated beverage container.

“It is a bedrock principle of property law that you own property made by your property,” Abbott said. “So if I have a 3D printer make a physical beverage container, I own that. There is no reason why I should be any less entitled to intangible property made by my AI. That’s the right outcome, as a matter of policy, that the owner of an AI system should own inventions made by that system.”

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