On 2 July 2021, a hearing took place at the Federal Court of Australia in Melbourne, before Justice Jonathan Beach, in the matter of Stephen Thaler v Commissioner of Patents.  This case concerns the question of whether a patent may be granted for an invention that was devised by a machine, rather than by a human inventor.  Back in February, I reported on the refusal by the Australian Patent Office to accept as valid an Australian patent application naming an ‘artificial intelligence’ going by the name DABUS (‘Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience’) as inventor.  And in March I reported that an application had been filed in the Federal Court for review of the Patent Office decision.

Regular readers will know my position on this issue – I do not consider it appropriate at this time (or, potentially, ever) to grant patents for inventions devised entirely by automated means, such that there is no human inventor.  I have written an article targeted to a more general audience, which has been published by InnovationAus, providing an overview of the Australian case, and broadly discussing my concerns.  Here I will be going into more detail of the arguments presented at the recent hearing, and why I think it would be very unfortunate if Justice Beach were to decide that this is a suitable case for judicial development of the law to embrace machine inventors, as he is being encouraged to do by Thaler.

I was able to attend the hearing virtually, since it was being held via web conference.  Thaler’s team, led by experienced and highly-regarded barrister David Shavin QC, appeared in person in the Melbourne courtroom with Justice Beach, while the Commissioner of Patents was represented by Hamish Bevan, appearing via video from Sydney (subject to restrictions, due to an ongoing COVID outbreak).  Although I disagree with the proposition, I thought that Mr Shavin presented a persuasive argument that the relevant provisions of the Australian Patents Act 1990 can, and should, be interpreted to encompass non-human inventors, and that Mr Bevan perhaps did not do enough to counter this argument.  I formed the impression that Justice Beach just might be minded to ‘develop’ the Australian law to permit patent applications having no human inventor, in part because he was not presented with any particularly good reasons not to do so.

On June 16, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that would impose new ESG due diligence and disclosure requirements on publicly traded companies.  H.R. 1187 – the ESG Disclosure Simplification Act of 2021 – would require publicly traded companies to disclose their commitments to ensuring that environmental, social (human rights), and good governance standards (ESG) are reflected in their operations, activities, and supply chains.

The Legislation’s Impact on ESG Due Diligence and Disclosure

Specifically,… More

The post Congress A Step Closer to Making Corporate ESG Disclosure Mandatory first appeared on IPO, Then What?.

Henk Poncin (1938) is one of the founding fathers of Green Prisoners Release Amsterdam. Thanks to this initiative, an American couple that fled to the Netherlands in 1994 to escape disproportional jail time for growing medicinal cannabis, received a much lower sentence. The Green Prisoners Release Amsterdam (GPRA) later became the Cannabis College; a free cannabis information centre located in Amsterdam.

The post Sensi Seeds Interviews Henk Poncin appeared first on Sensi Seeds.