The plaintiff Stephen Thaler sought to have patents issued for inventions made by his Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) system but his applications to the US Patent and Trademark Office and the US Court of Appeals were rejected because US patent law allows for patents to be issued solely to human inventors.
SCOTUS’ refusal to hear Thaler’s case has been criticized by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig who said the decision “jeopardizes billions (of dollars) in current and future investments, threatens U.S. competitiveness and reaches a result at odds with the plain language of the Patent Act.”
Thaler has also applied multiple times to the US Copyright Office for copyright protection of an art piece created by his DABUS. All his applications were rejected for lack of traditional human authorship.