AI Is Just a Computer Program After All – UK Court of Appeal rules

The Court of Appeal has just ruled that Emotional Perception AI’s neural-network based music recommendation tool should be treated the same as any other computer program under patent law, overturning the High Court’s decision. The judgment was given by Birss LJ, with whom Davies LJ and Arnold LJ agreed.

In doing so they dismissed the High Court’s finding (covered by our previous article here) that unique features of artificial neural networks (“ANNs”) differentiate them sufficiently to allow them to fall outside the default ban on patents for "a program for a computer ... as such".

After finding that the tool was a computer program, they turned to whether it is nevertheless patentable by virtue of making a “technical contribution” beyond just being such a program. They found this not to be impacted by the features of ANNs, and instead the function of the program itself (in this case to recommend a music track) is all that need be considered for that test.

Emotional Perception’s patent

Emotional Perception AI’s application concerns an ANN-based tool for associating (and thereby recommending) files based on semantic similarity. For example, it would associate musical tracks together based on both their emotional and musical similarity, with songs of the same genre and mood being considered closely related. This is then to be used to select a new track that is sufficiently similar to any given input track.

This ANN based process functions through having a set of weights developed through training. These weights are adapted autonomously through a backpropagation process until their analysis of training data provides the same outcome as the human-determined “right” outcome for that data, and are then immutable in further operation of the ANN.

The application claimed a method of making this association and recommendation, and a system which does this. However, nothing in the decision turned on the distinction between these claims to the ANN. 

(For further details, and a summary on how ANNs work, see our previous article here)

ANNs as Computer Programs

The first part of the appeal covered whether Emotional Perception AI’s claimed ANN was a computer program. 

Birss LJ noted that a computer program could be defined simply as “a set of instructions for a computer to do something”, with a computer simply defined as “a machine which processes information”. The question was whether Emotional Perception AI’s process fell under this definition.

Emotional Perception AI argued that its claimed ANN was not a computer program, based on the unique features of ANNs compared to standard computer programs. However, applying the definition of a computer program, Birss LJ rejected this analysis for the following reasons:

• Firstly, the fact that the final form of the process was not defined by a human programmer (e.g. through the weights being developed through training) was deemed to not be a distinction, noting that the final form of computer programs in general is normally computer-generated due to the compilation process applied to the human-written code.
  
• Secondly, the fact that ANNs solve problems which are hard to be fully formulated by a human…