[00:00:00] Speaker 05:
in number 21, 2347, Fowler against Vidal, Mr. Abbott.

[00:00:10] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:00:10] Speaker 02:
May it please the court, my name is Ryan Abbott, counsel for appellant Stephen Fowler.

[00:00:15] Speaker 02:
This case raises the novel legal issue of whether a patent can be obtained for an invention created by an artificial intelligence in the absence of a traditional human inventor, what is today called an AI-generated invention.

[00:00:28] Speaker 02:
The Patent Office says no, but that decision is at odds with the plain language and purpose of the Patent Act.

[00:00:35] Speaker 02:
Nothing in the Act says that only a natural person can be an inventor.

[00:00:39] Speaker 02:
The Act uses terms for inventors that can refer to natural persons, but not terms that must refer to natural persons.

[00:00:46] Speaker 02:
For example, the Patent Office opened a projection of Dr. Thaler's patents on the basis of terms like whoever suggests a natural person, but that's it, suggestions.

[00:00:55] Speaker 02:
In fact, even within the Patent Act, Section 271 uses the term whoever in the context of infringement to refer to artificial as well as natural persons.

[00:01:04] Speaker 02:
By contrast, there's a very explicit prohibition of the Patent Act standing in the way of the Office's interpretation, namely Section 103, which states that patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.

[00:01:18] Speaker 02:
But that's exactly what the Patent Office is doing here, prohibiting an otherwise patentable invention from protection

[00:01:24] Speaker 01:
Simply because- What about the definition of inventor, which is defined by the Patent Act as an individual or individuals collectively?

[00:01:34] Speaker 02:
Sure.

[00:01:34] Speaker 02:
Well, to properly understand the meaning of inventor in this context requires considering the purpose and context of the act.

[00:01:43] Speaker 01:
No, actually I would like you to just consider the language of the act.

[00:01:47] Speaker 01:
How can AI be an individual?

[00:01:51] Speaker 02:
Well, an individual can refer to a number of things, a natural person, a company, an animal, a machine, an artificial person.

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The Supreme Court recently interpreted the meaning of individual.

[00:02:04] Speaker 01:
Well, actually, an individual can't be a company.

[00:02:06] Speaker 01:
And haven't we actually held that quite clearly?

[00:02:09] Speaker 01:
Haven't we said corporations cannot be inventors?

[00:02:14] Speaker 02:
Well, the Supreme Court, at least in Clinton v. New York, found that an individual could include a company.

[00:02:21] Speaker 02:
There are two cases from this court in which the court stated an inventor was a natural person, University of Utah v. Max Planck and Beech Aircraft v. Edo Corp.

[00:02:32] Speaker 02:
But there are two things I think are important to bear in mind with those decisions.

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First, those decisions were with respect to corporate inventorship.

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And corporate inventorship is different than AI inventorship.

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With a company, it is literally composed of natural persons

[00:02:51] Speaker 02:
can only act through natural persons.

[00:02:53] Speaker 02:
So if a company like IBM could say they invented something, there's a risk you leave a human inventor off of her patent.

[00:03:00] Speaker 02:
That's not the case here, where the AI acted autonomously from any inventive skill on behalf of a person.

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Also, even in those cases, as I read them, they involve complex procedural matters.

[00:03:13] Speaker 02:
And neither party was arguing that a state or a corporation could be an inventor.

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So even in that context, I think those statements were dicta.

[00:03:21] Speaker 05:
Can I ask you a language question whose precise bearing I'm not sure of.

[00:03:30] Speaker 05:
But when I go to some dictionaries, with at least only one exception that I can find, what I find in definitions of artificial intelligence is that it is the capability

[00:03:50] Speaker 05:
of a machine, so that it would be the counterpart to saying, I personally have an intelligence, and that intelligence was used to invent something.

[00:04:03] Speaker 05:
Nevertheless, the inventor would not be my intelligence.

[00:04:06] Speaker 05:
It would be this physical thing, person, that has the intelligence.

[00:04:15] Speaker 05:
And my general sense has been that the term artificial intelligence is nearly always, and in some dictionaries only, used to refer to the capability, not to the machine that has it.

[00:04:33] Speaker 05:
That would make

[00:04:35] Speaker 05:
extremely odd, even just for that reason alone, to say, to indulge the usage that you have to indulge, which you say, an AI, the AI, as a unit that could be an inventor.

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It seems like a different kind of thing from the intelligence that I, for example, might exercise.

[00:05:00] Speaker 05:
My intelligence would not be the inventor.

[00:05:05] Speaker 02:
Sure, Your Honor.

[00:05:05] Speaker 02:
Well, I would submit that an ordinary usage and artificial intelligence can refer to an inventive entity.

[00:05:14] Speaker 02:
In this particular case, the AI is a software program operating on a physical machine.

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So if the court was more comfortable thinking about it as a machine was the inventive entity, I think that those two terms could be used here synonymously.

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Unless the software was placed on, say, 1,000

[00:05:38] Speaker 02:
Well, this is not a case involving a distributed software program.

[00:05:44] Speaker 05:
I guess what I'm suggesting is that this whole notion of taking artificial intelligence, who is ordinary, maybe not as of yesterday or the week before yesterday, was referring to a capability and not a physical thing with the capability, makes it even odder to think of

[00:06:08] Speaker 05:
saying that the inventor is what you call an artificial intelligence.

[00:06:14] Speaker 05:
An inventor would not even be a human intelligence.

[00:06:18] Speaker 05:
It would be the human within.

[00:06:21] Speaker 02:
As we were using the term, Your Honor, artificial intelligence was the way that we described a distinct inventive entity that is a software program operator.

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It is one software program operating on one specific physical computer.

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And we used artificial intelligence in its meaning as referring to an individual.

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If again, the idea of a machine being the inventive entity were more comfortable language, I think they would be synonymous here.

[00:06:51] Speaker 07:
Okay.

[00:06:53] Speaker 07:
Can you return to the statutory language?

[00:06:56] Speaker 07:
I just want to make sure I understand your position on that, where the chief judge started you.

[00:07:01] Speaker 07:
The statute expressly defines inventor as an individual or individuals.

[00:07:07] Speaker 07:
And we know from the Supreme Court decision in Muhammad that, at least in normal, ordinary statutory usage, that's a natural person.

[00:07:17] Speaker 07:
unless, I guess, if there's some contrary indication.

[00:07:20] Speaker 07:
Do you agree with that analysis?

[00:07:23] Speaker 07:
And if so, are there indications to the contrary somewhere in the Patent Act?

[00:07:30] Speaker 02:
Yes, there are, Your Honor.

[00:07:31] Speaker 02:
And I think the Supreme Court was very careful in Mohammed to say, here, it means individual.

[00:07:37] Speaker 02:
By the language, the context, and the purpose of the act, it all makes sense.

[00:07:41] Speaker 02:
In other statutes, it hasn't.

[00:07:43] Speaker 02:
And I think here, the indication that an individual means something broader is the fact that the Patent Act has been routinely interpreted to give terms broad meaning in a way that promotes innovation.

[00:07:57] Speaker 02:
So under Diamond v. Chakravarti, for example, the Supreme Court held denying inventions in areas not contemplated by Congress would

[00:08:06] Speaker 07:
Let me just interrupt you just for a second, because my understanding is this definition of inventor was added in the AIA.

[00:08:12] Speaker 07:
So it's only about, what, 10, 11 years old.

[00:08:16] Speaker 07:
Is that correct?

[00:08:17] Speaker 07:
And can you point to cases subsequent to the adoption of that statutory definition that would somehow be indicative of what you're arguing?

[00:08:27] Speaker 02:
Sure.

[00:08:28] Speaker 02:
That is correct.

[00:08:30] Speaker 02:
And I'm not aware of any case that has interpreted that definition in any way since that case.

[00:08:37] Speaker 02:
The two rules of statutory construction that I would argue requires the understanding that an inventor be an inventive entity broadly here.

[00:08:48] Speaker 02:
are Yates v. United States and King v. Burwell, which are Supreme Court cases explaining how context and purpose are critical for statutory interpretation, particularly in a term like an individual, which can mean different things.

[00:09:03] Speaker 02:
In Yates, the Supreme Court held that a fish was not a tangible object for purposes of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

[00:09:08] Speaker 02:
And literally, of course, a fish is a tangible object.

[00:09:11] Speaker 02:
But the act was concerned with destruction of corporate financial records, and the term tangible object needed to be interpreted with that in mind.

[00:09:18] Speaker 02:
In King v. Burwell, the court held that a health exchange established by a state included a federally established exchange.

[00:09:25] Speaker 02:
And the reason for that holding was that it would have been inconsistent with congressional intent to exclusively rely on a literal interpretation.

[00:09:32] Speaker 02:
So applying the ruling that came here, Congress passed the Patent Act to encourage innovation not to inhibit it.

[00:09:39] Speaker 02:
If at all possible, the act has to be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the former and that avoids the latter.

[00:09:45] Speaker 02:
And so here, individual needs a broader meaning as an inventor.

[00:09:51] Speaker 05:
How do you think we should make a judgment if we got to it about the question whether allowing an inventor to include either a piece of software or a machine with a piece of software resident on it would advance or run counter to the purposes of the patent act?

[00:10:15] Speaker 02:
Well, I think that the overall- It may be self-evident to you.

[00:10:22] Speaker 05:
Just to use language a little bit carefully, it sure isn't self-evident to me that this policy argument favors you.

[00:10:31] Speaker 02:
Sure.

[00:10:32] Speaker 02:
And the Patent Office attempts to frame this as a policy argument, but I would say that it's a purpose.

[00:10:37] Speaker 05:
I'm sorry.

[00:10:37] Speaker 05:
You frame it as a policy point.

[00:10:39] Speaker 02:
Fair enough, Your Honor.

[00:10:41] Speaker 02:
And what I suppose I mean to say is that it's policy relevant to the purpose of the act and to how it should be interpreted statutorily.

[00:10:49] Speaker 02:
Essentially, the Patent Act is agnostic as to how an invention is generated.

[00:10:55] Speaker 02:
And if we are moving into a research paradigm in which drug companies will have AI find and repurpose new drugs instead of going to teams of pharmacologists, that sort of behavior is something that we want to encourage under the act

[00:11:09] Speaker 02:
If Pfizer can make an antibody to treat COVID from a supercomputer instead of a group of people, that's intensive activity.

[00:11:17] Speaker 02:
And if you don't allow a patent on that, it A, says to companies, you can't use machines in research and development in this manner if you care about patents.

[00:11:26] Speaker 02:
Or it says you can own the output as a trade secret, but you can never disclose it or you'll lose your intellectual property rights.

[00:11:33] Speaker 02:
And as the Patent Act is designed to incentivize innovation, promote disclosure of trade secrets, and commercialization of new products, like new drugs, that require patents to make these very significant R&D investments, all of that would be frustrated under the Patent Office's interpretation.

[00:11:50] Speaker 02:
That's not something that they ever engage with, which is one reason why Skidmore Deference isn't due to them, together with the fact that their proposed interpretation runs squarely afoul of things like Section 103.

[00:12:02] Speaker 05:
You're into your rebuttal.

[00:12:04] Speaker 05:
You can continue, or you can save this.

[00:12:07] Speaker 02:
I'll save the time for rebuttal.

[00:12:08] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:12:09] Speaker 05:
Thank you.

[00:12:13] Speaker 05:
Mr. Bargand?

[00:12:15] Speaker 05:
Yes.

[00:12:15] Speaker 05:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:12:18] Speaker 00:
Good morning, Your Honors, and may it please the court.

[00:12:21] Speaker 00:
In 2011, nearly a decade ago, and only a decade ago, Congress amended the Patent Act to explicitly define the term inventor as an individual.

[00:12:30] Speaker 00:
and then expressly bolstered that definition by using personal pronouns to define that individual.

[00:12:37] Speaker 05:
Gendered personal pronouns.

[00:12:39] Speaker 00:
Excuse me, Your Honor.

[00:12:39] Speaker 05:
Gendered personal pronouns.

[00:12:41] Speaker 00:
Gendered personal pronouns, correct.

[00:12:42] Speaker 00:
Himself and herself.

[00:12:45] Speaker 00:
The district court correctly held through a comprehensive written opinion that a collection of source code, as my colleague has described Davis here,

[00:12:53] Speaker 00:
did not fit within the plain meaning of the statutory term individual, as the Supreme Court defined it in Mohammed, as a human being.

[00:13:01] Speaker 00:
Because time and again, the Supreme Court and this court have held that this plain meaning analysis ends any exercise in statutory construction, regardless of the preferred policy outcome that my colleague urges on this court here, whether laudable or not, this court should affirm.

[00:13:20] Speaker 00:
And I will be very brief in going through our statutory analysis for your honors.

[00:13:26] Speaker 00:
In the AIA, as Judge Stark noted during his colloquy with my colleague, section 100 F was added to the PACNAC.

[00:13:34] Speaker 00:
And that states that an inventor is, quote, the individual, or if a joint invention, the individuals collectively who invented or discovered the subject matter of the invention.

[00:13:45] Speaker 00:
In Muhammad, the Supreme Court said that the plain statutory definition of the term individual is a human being.

[00:13:53] Speaker 00:
And it used three indicia to get to that result.

[00:13:57] Speaker 00:
One, the dictionary definition of individual when used as a noun, as it is here in the Patent Act.

[00:14:03] Speaker 00:
Second, normal parlance.

[00:14:04] Speaker 00:
That is, people do not refer to a company as an individual, nor does it refer to a collection of source code, a software program as an individual.

[00:14:13] Speaker 00:
And also, the Dictionary Act in Title I of the Code, which defines individual as different from a company or other entities.

[00:14:22] Speaker 05:
All three of those individuals.

[00:14:24] Speaker 05:
I don't have that in front of me.

[00:14:25] Speaker 05:
Is that a definition of person?

[00:14:27] Speaker 05:
That is the definition of person.

[00:14:28] Speaker 05:
And individual is one of the items in the list.

[00:14:30] Speaker 00:
Correct.

[00:14:31] Speaker 00:
And it is different from an entity in that respect, Your Honor.

[00:14:35] Speaker 00:
It is thus no surprise that this court on two occasions, in Etto and Max Planck,

[00:14:41] Speaker 00:
to find an inventor to be a natural person.

[00:14:44] Speaker 00:
The burden to overcome that plain language is not simply based on what one perceives as the policy genesis of a particular statute.

[00:14:54] Speaker 00:
It is, as the Supreme Court held in Muhammad, there must be some textual context.

[00:14:59] Speaker 00:
There must be some written, explicit language that says otherwise.

[00:15:04] Speaker 00:
And here, not only do we not have that other statutory language, we have the direct opposite, which is, as we referenced

[00:15:13] Speaker 00:
in my opening, the gendered pronouns that only bolster the need to define individual as a human being.

[00:15:23] Speaker 00:
My colleague references in this respect 35 United States Code Section 103 and the final sentence of that provision

[00:15:30] Speaker 00:
which states that patentability should not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.

[00:15:35] Speaker 00:
The Supreme Court in Graham against John Deere nearly 50 years ago or so now has said that that provision, that one sentence, applies only to the part of patentability that is referenced in section 103.

[00:15:49] Speaker 00:
In fact, a quote from the Supreme Court's decision.

[00:15:53] Speaker 00:
The second sentence states that patentability as to this requirement,

[00:15:58] Speaker 00:
is not to be negative by the manner in which this invention was made.

[00:16:02] Speaker 00:
That is, it is immaterial whether it resulted from long toil and experimentation or from a flash of genius.

[00:16:08] Speaker 00:
And more recently in Honeywell International 2017, decisions from this court, this court held that the very purpose of that sentence is to avoid problems from routine experimentation being used to preclude patentability.

[00:16:25] Speaker 00:
All of these statutory indicia, Your Honor, lead to the conclusion that there is only one plain language definition of the term inventor, and that is of a human being, and that Davis, which is not a human being, does not qualify as an inventor.

[00:16:44] Speaker 00:
And for that reason, the PTO correctly denied Dr. Thaler's petition to say otherwise, and the district court correctly affirmed that conclusion under the Administrative Procedures Act.

[00:16:55] Speaker 05:
Can I ask you a question about something I think you say in your brief that for some of the kind of situations that Mr. Abbott was referring to,

[00:17:10] Speaker 05:
namely a scientist running a super supercomputer where it's only the supercomputer that comes up with, you know, a particular extremely complicated antibody structure that I think you say, well, it's possible that that scientist having programmed the computer could be an inventor can

[00:17:31] Speaker 05:
I realize we're not here to discuss, you know, to resolve that question, but can you elaborate a little bit on what the issues would be if that scientist were to claim, you know, the particular antibody result of a software program that he or she set to run on the computer?

[00:17:58] Speaker 00:
I sure can, Your Honor.

[00:18:00] Speaker 00:
I guess I should say I can sure try.

[00:18:03] Speaker 00:
And I think that is because both legally and pragmatically, that question raises a sort of Pandora's box of issues.

[00:18:10] Speaker 00:
From the legal perspective, it is true that the USPTO's petition decisions below said that under the facts of this case, that is, the facts as Dr. Thaler presented them to the USPTO below,

[00:18:24] Speaker 00:
Dr. Thaler had no involvement whatsoever in the conception of the invention here.

[00:18:29] Speaker 00:
And so as an Administrative Procedure Act case- Was that stipulated or actually decided by the agency?

[00:18:35] Speaker 00:
That was the upshot of Dr. Thaler's argument.

[00:18:39] Speaker 00:
And that was the premise of the USPTO's decisions.

[00:18:42] Speaker 05:
And of course, as an APA action, that is- That's different from a finding of fact independently made.

[00:18:46] Speaker 00:
That is absolutely correct.

[00:18:48] Speaker ?:
Correct.

[00:18:49] Speaker 00:
And that is the set of circumstances or facts on which the USPTO decided this petition, and then the district court decided this case.

[00:18:59] Speaker 00:
And under that set of facts, there is no doubt that there is no patent ability of this device, I'm sorry, of this subject matter by Gavis here.

[00:19:11] Speaker 00:
If, however, as your honor posited.

[00:19:13] Speaker 00:
By Gavis?

[00:19:14] Speaker 00:
By Gavis.

[00:19:15] Speaker 00:
By Gavis.

[00:19:16] Speaker 00:
The creative collective machine.

[00:19:19] Speaker 00:
or source code.

[00:19:21] Speaker 00:
If, however, the circumstances were slightly different than they are presented here, and Dr. Thaler could say that he participated in some way in creating this subject matter and listed himself as the inventor, the PTO said that may, under certain circumstances, be a different story.

[00:19:43] Speaker 00:
That's not the case here, but it may be a different story.

[00:19:47] Speaker 01:
Well, counsel, along those lines, if I program, if I actually write the code, the programs, the computer that has it do some sort of, for example, genetic sequencing, aren't I then the inventor?

[00:20:04] Speaker 01:
I, the programmer, not the program, but the programmer, aren't I then the

[00:20:09] Speaker 01:
the inventor of whatever it was that I conceived of writing software code to do.

[00:20:16] Speaker 00:
Under those limited circumstances, Your Honor, I think that you may be the inventor of that, or at least an inventor of that subject matter.

[00:20:28] Speaker 01:
Well, when you say an inventor, I wouldn't coexist.

[00:20:30] Speaker 01:
There wouldn't be two of us, me and the program, Ira.

[00:20:33] Speaker 01:
Right?

[00:20:33] Speaker 01:
It would just be me.

[00:20:35] Speaker 00:
As a legal matter, yes, Your Honor.

[00:20:37] Speaker 00:
That's correct.

[00:20:37] Speaker 00:
Because the definition of joint inventor is equally tied to the term individual as is a singular inventor.

[00:20:44] Speaker 00:
That's correct.

[00:20:47] Speaker 00:
But going back to your question, Judge Toronto, the panoply of pragmatic issues that would

[00:20:56] Speaker 00:
that that might raise are almost innumerable.

[00:21:01] Speaker 00:
That is, when there is an inventorship challenge, perhaps after a patent issue.

[00:21:05] Speaker 05:
I guess I just want to say this.

[00:21:08] Speaker 05:
To some extent, I thought that your presentation of this point, abbreviated, of course, in your brief, was offered as a kind of comfort to say that there are innumerable

[00:21:21] Speaker 05:
panically innumerable problems reduces the comfort somewhat.

[00:21:26] Speaker 00:
Well, I don't want to reduce any comfort whatsoever under any circumstances.

[00:21:32] Speaker 00:
But what I am referencing in that respect is that, as the Supreme Court has said repeatedly, most recently in Kimball, that is, when there are these types of pragmatic issues that would arise from a particular statutory construction, such as how do you depose somebody like Davis in an inventorship challenge down the road?

[00:21:54] Speaker 00:
Those are the types of questions that Congress is designed to tackle and determine under what circumstances this kind of rubric and artificial intelligence machine, being an inventor, can go forward.

[00:22:10] Speaker 00:
And thus my colleague's use of the statutory purpose of this

[00:22:15] Speaker 00:
of the Patent Act being innovation is slightly simplistic, I would argue, because it may be that the Patent Act is designed to create innovation.

[00:22:25] Speaker 00:
But one person's innovation is another person's step backwards.

[00:22:29] Speaker 00:
And how we administer or implement a system in which an artificial intelligence machine can be an inventor is difficult.

[00:22:39] Speaker 00:
And that is the subject matter that Congress is designed to deal with.

[00:22:46] Speaker 00:
Unless there are any other questions, Your Honor, I am more than happy to cede my time.

[00:22:50] Speaker 00:
I thank the court for its time.

[00:22:51] Speaker 05:
Thank you, Mr. Barkan.

[00:22:54] Speaker 05:
OK, Mr. Abbott, you have three minutes, I think.

[00:22:57] Speaker 02:
Thank you, Your Honor.

[00:22:59] Speaker 02:
I'd like to briefly touch on this question about whether a programmer could be an inventor, which here is not the case as an undisputed factual matter, although not a finding of fact, per se.

[00:23:10] Speaker 02:
And in some cases, it may be that a programmer is indeed an inventor.

[00:23:13] Speaker 02:
If you program an AI to find an antibody that treats COVID-19, that might do it.

[00:23:19] Speaker 02:
But some of the machine learning algorithms used by companies in materials engineering or drug discovery are programmed by thousands of people spread over time and space.

[00:23:28] Speaker 02:
And the people using the programs may not be using them for a specific, understood reason that came up.

[00:23:35] Speaker 02:
Sorry, I didn't say that well.

[00:23:37] Speaker 02:
You know, for example, a programmer may be designing a machine learning algorithm to optimize industrial components and some other group of people may use that to optimize the structure of a brake pad.

[00:23:49] Speaker 02:
you know in that case the many people designing the original program may not have any idea of the claims that are coming out of the machine or the specific problem that's being used to solve.

[00:23:59] Speaker 02:
None of those people will have exhibited any inventive skill with respect to the actual claimed invention unless under U.S.

[00:24:06] Speaker 02:
law could not qualify as inventors.

[00:24:10] Speaker 02:
You know I take Mr. Barragans point that you know

[00:24:15] Speaker 02:
Policy issues are for Congress.

[00:24:17] Speaker 02:
On the other hand, Congress has already passed the Patent Act with a well-understood purpose that it is broadly intended to promote innovation, disclosure of trade secrets, and commercializations of new products.

[00:24:29] Speaker 02:
And Congress has already said we should be agnostic about the way that these inventions are made.

[00:24:34] Speaker 02:
Now, whatever the court decides, Congress may decide down the road, you know, we liken AI inventors, we don't.

[00:24:39] Speaker 02:
They change the Patent Act.

[00:24:40] Speaker 02:
That's their prerogative.

[00:24:42] Speaker 02:
But Congress has already passed an act that has been interpreted very broadly by the Supreme Court to promote these purposes.

[00:24:48] Speaker 02:
And so we believe Dr. Thaler, in this matter, should have individual subject to a broad definition that captures what is really socially very beneficial sorts of innovation.

[00:25:01] Speaker 07:
Mr. Adams, on section 103, do you have any response to the patent office's citation to the Graham versus Deer decision?

[00:25:09] Speaker 02:
And I might request that we submit some supplementary commentary on that, as it's the first time that point was raised.

[00:25:15] Speaker 02:
But I think my off-the-cuff response would be this.

[00:25:18] Speaker 02:
Section 103 was indeed enacted to deal with the flash of genius problem.

[00:25:23] Speaker 02:
But it was a broader, in my understanding, it is a broader term that he is giving it credit for.

[00:25:29] Speaker 02:
Congress is basically saying, we don't want to open the Pandora's box of how something is made, in part because we don't care.

[00:25:36] Speaker 02:
There's a system we believe economically it under produces innovation without patent law.

[00:25:42] Speaker 02:
We want patent law to get more socially valuable innovation.

[00:25:45] Speaker 02:
And if it comes from a person or robot or a room full of monkeys, not that we're alleging a monkey should be an inventor.

[00:25:51] Speaker 02:
So forget that analogy.

[00:25:52] Speaker 02:
All we really want is the system to produce more innovation.

[00:25:55] Speaker 02:
And that's exactly what would happen here, understanding an individual as an inventive entity.

[00:26:00] Speaker 05:
By the way, do you happen to know, do the mythic monkeys who type out Shakespeare get to be copyright holders?

[00:26:13] Speaker 02:
I see I haven't passed my time, so I thought you had.

[00:26:18] Speaker 05:
OK, thank you.

[00:26:20] Speaker 05:
Oh, thank you.

[00:26:21] Speaker 05:
OK, thanks to both parties, the case is submitted.

[00:26:26] Speaker 07:
Thank you.

[00:26:33] Speaker ?:
Thank you.

[00:27:05] Speaker 06:
I'm not sure if they come up with something new

[00:27:34] Speaker 03:
Mr. Huffman, can you hear me?

[00:27:45] Speaker 04:
Not on the screen.

[00:28:04] Speaker 03:
Mr. Buckman, can you hear me?

[00:28:34] Speaker 04:
Yes.

[00:28:35] Speaker 04:
Can you hear me OK?

[00:28:37] Speaker ?:
Yes, I can.

[00:28:39] Speaker 03:
And can you see both Judge Toronto and Judge Stark in person and Chief Judge Moore via video?

[00:28:48] Speaker 01:
Yes.

[00:28:50] Speaker 01:
Are you certain?

[00:28:52] Speaker 01:
Yes.

[00:28:52] Speaker 03:
Are you having any difficulty visually or hearing?

[00:29:01] Speaker 05:
Is there a lighting question on Chief Judge Moore?

[00:29:05] Speaker 04:
Uh, there's a little bit of a, there's a bit of an echo, but I can hear you for the most part.

[00:29:12] Speaker 01:
If you have an echo, you have to turn off, uh, if you have live streaming of our arguments on, you have to turn that off and just pivot to zoom.

[00:29:19] Speaker 04:
I don't have that on.

[00:29:21] Speaker 03:
Is that a little better, Mr.

[00:29:40] Speaker ?:
Thanks.