Artificial Intelligence In Search of Protection — Part I

Is a patent a straw, stick or brick house?

http://fairytalesbytempleton.blogspot.com.es/2010/11/three-little-pigs.html

This is a series of four articles on AI and IP protection:

Part I — Why patenting an AI innovation is different

Part II — The advantages of patenting AI products

Part III — Reasons behind not looking for patent protection

Part IV — AI Patents Landscape

I. Setting the stage

Working alongside early-stage companies, venture funds, and corporations, I often wonder what the word “defensibility” means nowadays for an AI startup. And even if I find myself often thinking and advising people on why a patent on a machine learning product/algorithm makes sense or not, I recently realized that this problem is actually related to how I see an AI company be protected in the long-run.

I will blog later about the broader concept of defensibility and rather focus here only on IP protection. I am not a patent lawyer, so there might likely be many details I…