The Artificial Inventor And The Anthropocentric Statute: AI-Generated Inventions, The Dabus Refusal, And The Reform Choice Facing Indian Patent Law
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
S. Vishali & S. Vidhya, LL.B., Government Law College, Coimbatore
ABSTRACT
On 15 April 2026 the Indian Patent Office issued its first substantive determination on machine inventorship, refusing Stephen Thaler’s DABUS application and confirming that an artificial intelligence system cannot be the “true and first inventor” under the Patents Act, 1970. Read against the wider global series and India’s Revised Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions, 2025, the refusal is frequently described as evidence that Indian patent law is “broken” or structurally deficient. This article resists that framing. It argues, first, that the refusal is a coherent and defensible application of the internal logic of patent law rather than the symptom of a drafting failure; the human-authorship requirement is embedded across the Act’s entitlement, declaration and evaluation provisions because it reflects the derivation principle and the incentive rationale on which the system rests. Second, it shows that the real question DABUS crystallises is not doctrinal but normative, and that it is genuinely contested: the scholarly field divides between a “tool” position that resists any reform, a “recognition” position that would extend the system to machine inventions, and an “alternative-incentives” position that would withhold patent protection altogether. Third, it contends that the strongest objection to India’s current settlement is institutional rather than textual: a policy question this consequential and this contested has been left to executive guidance and case-by-case construction, even though a parliamentary committee flagged it as early as 2021. The article maps the design space, tests the comparative models that are said to be transferable to India, and proposes a calibrated, evidence-led reform path—one that gives the Controller enacted rather than inferred authority, resolves ownership before inventorship, and builds in structured review—while candidly acknowledging the risks of over-reform. Its contribution is to reframe the Indian debate from a narrative of crisis to one of deliberate legislative choice.
Keywords: AI inventorship; DABUS; Patents Act 1970; CRI Guidelines 2025; derivation principle; incentive theory; patent reform; Parliamentary Standing Committee; comparative patent law.
