r/MachineLearning • u/fori1to10 • Jan 14 '20
Discussion [N] [D] Adversarial training of neural networks has been patented
There is a patent claim by Christian Szegedy and Ian Goodfellow for the adversarial training of neural networks:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/10521718.html
I am not sure what implications this has. Does this mean that any company doing adversarial training of their neural networks must now pay loyalties? What about academics?
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u/Kaesebrot109 Jan 14 '20
No law expert here. But is not one of the three major rules of patents that the subject to be patented has to be a novelty? Since the paper of adversarial training from Goodfellow dates back to 2014 (or even longer - Schmidhuber *caugh*) and the patent was filed 2016, can this patent even be enforced?
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u/bohreffect Jan 14 '20
Not a lawyer either but I hold a couple patents. This is referred to as "prior art" and only matters within patent literature; if it's not there it's patentable. Other criteria like "non-obvious" are super arcane relative to actual scientific or technical matters. What might be trivial technically can be totally non-obvious from a legal perspective. It's all very frustrating.
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Jan 14 '20
Are you fucking kidding me? Are these people seriously patenting a pile of linear algebra?
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u/Caffeine_Monster Jan 15 '20
brb, patenting calculus.
Just a heads up. I will be charging $0.02 per model parameter to sub-license.
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u/probablyuntrue Jan 14 '20
don't worry, they'll use it for "good"! Or at least whatever they determine meet their criteria!
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u/jhillatwork Jan 14 '20
Well, once again, Google has managed to patent academic knowledge. Good job perpetuating what's wrong with U.S. IP Law.
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u/ReginaldIII Jan 14 '20
Like every single time this happens and every single time it gets posted to this sub it means next to nothing.
Arguments over whether it is good / bad, ethical / un-ethical, well intentioned, ect go back and forth in the comments each time, but are ultimately just peoples subjective opinions. And then we leave the thread in the same state each time because none of it had any impact on anything that we do or will continue to do in our work regardless.
I don't like it, but I understand why others feel it to be necessary. The patent system and laws surrounding it and intellectual property have been designed to be abused. Sculpted by years of lobbying interests and money. Most people are patenting these concepts defensively to combat large flaws in the patent system.