November 25, 1999 WHAT'S NEXT; When a Gizmo Can Invent a Gizmo By ANNE EISENBERG
IF Dr. Frankenstein's monster had published a best seller, who would have gotten the rights to that intellectual property?
His inventor up in the castle, of course.
Tough luck for the monster, but these are still early days for intellectual property rights for thinking machines. No one has seriously proposed that a computer should receive a share of the profits from an invention -- at least not yet. But other problems related to the ownership of items invented by computers are already being debated in preparation for the time, probably in about 10 years, when such inventions will be commonplace, said David E. Goldberg, an engineer and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.
Computers are already making inroads in the area of intellectual property as they design antennas, gas turbines and integrated circuits. Much of the work in this field of automatic discovery is preliminary and a lot of it is proprietary and therefore secret, but what can be seen provides tantalizing glimpses of a future in which computers work day and night -- no breaks for lunch -- to come up with original solutions with very little help from their programmers.