No solvency deficit – the inventions still get patented.
Feldman 19 – Law Professor, Law Chair, & Director of the Center for Innovation, UC Hastings; one of the nation's leading experts in IP & pharmaceutical law Robin C. Feldman, Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law, Albert Abramson ’54 Distinguished Professor of Law Chair, and Director of the Center for Innovation, at UC Hastings, and Nick Thieme, Chapter 3: Competition at the dawn of artificial intelligence, Competition Law for the Digital Economy, Monograph Book, Björn Lundqvist and Michal S. Gal (eds.), pub. Dec 2019, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788971836
As discussed earlier, a company’s return on research investment is in the form of patent ownership and control, not simply having a name on a patent. Patent ownership allows companies to bolster their market position by gaining market exclusivity or to block competitors’ entry into the market, to sell additional products through bundling arrangements or licensing, or simply to own the patent for a rainy day. These motivations are completely independent of the arrangement of inventor bragging or credit rights and focus solely on ownership rights. From the perspective of the company, then, whether a human, an AI, or no one at all is listed on the patent as an initial matter makes no difference. Ownership will accrue to the company contractually, and they make their money either way. This implies that employee compensation doesn’t change depending on who is on the patent. If the patent is equally valuable to the company in any scenario, they equally value its creator in any scenario. From an economic perspective, then, engineers should receive the same pay from their employer, the same prize bonus for a patent, the same increase in likelihood for internal promotion, regardless of who is on the patent listing as an initial matter.