About Lance Abramson Lance Abramson is a patent attorney and an Attorney of the High Court of South Africa. With more than two decades of experience, Lance brings expertise in the filing of applications in the electric, electronic, software and nanotechnology fields and related litigation. His practice focuses primarily on domestic and international patent and design matters. About Spoor & Fisher Spoor & Fisher is a pan-African IP law firm with over 100 years of history that prides itself on its ability to handle the intricacies involved in registering and enforcing IP in every African country. Its teams comprise specialists in trade marks, patents, copyright, anti-counterfeiting, registered designs, commercial IP, IP audits and all other aspects of IP law. Contact Lance Abramson Partner Spoor & Fisher 11 Byls Bridge Boulevard, Building No. 14, Highveld Ext 73, Centurion, Pretoria, 0046, South Africa Tel: +27 11 994 5111 E: l.abramson@spoor.com www.spoor.com owns the copyright in the work produced by, for example, ChatGPT, and much has already been written about this question in law which has not yet been resolved. There are three possibilities: that the copyright vests in the AI, in the programmer of the AI or in the person that uses the AI to generate the work. AI tools will most certainly profoundly impact the legal profession. AI tools are already being used to automate drafting tasks currently done by attorneys. This provides efficiency benefits to attorneys and their clients. In the field of patent law, there are already AI tools which can assist a patent attorney to draft and file patent applications, although these tools are not yet ubiquitous. It is certainly not far away that AI tools will be available to assist patent examiners with the patent examination process described above. Indeed, there are potential opportunities and challenges that AI presents and will present for inventors, patent attorneys and other stakeholders in the patent system. A further area of interesting and rapid development is the digitally immersive world known as the metaverse and its ramifications for IP – including patents. There has been an enormous growth of patent applications which relate to virtual reality technologies in the past five years. These patents relate, for example, to systems for generating and interacting with a virtual reality environment, systems for managing ephemeral locations in a virtual universe and other virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. Another interesting angle to consider at the intersection of the metaverse and patents is the use of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to represents patents in the metaverse. For example, the ownership of the patent can be captured and certified in an NFT, which would certify not only who the current owner of the patent is but would also capture, in a way that could not be tampered with, the historical chain of ownership of the patent, for example. This could lead to a huge cost reduction when recording assignments of patents at various patent offices around the world, which is a tedious and costly exercise. Already, IBM and IPwe have teamed up to create the infrastructure for an NFT-based patent marketplace. For a South African patent attorney, 2023 represents an exciting time to be practising law – the introduction of patent examination, the rise of AI and the metaverse will mean our world in the months and years ahead will be vastly different from what lies behind us. As with all things, this dynamic change brings opportunity to those who are willing to adapt and leverage. At over 100 years old, the law firm Spoor & Fisher clearly have adaptation as part of our DNA and look forward to harnessing all of these changes for the better of our team and clients! THOUGHT LEADER 75 AI tools will most certainly profoundly impact the legal profession. AI tools are already being used to automate drafting tasks currently done by attorneys.
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