The first, and possibly most important, part of getting an invention patented is identifying who invented it.

Traditionally, that was not much of a feat. Today, however, "inventors" are beginning to look different from what the Patent Act imagined when it passed at the end of the 18th century.

Perhaps few other instances portray that better than Thaler v. Vidal, where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that artificial intelligence (AI) machines cannot be named inventors because the law expressly states that inventors are "individuals," and machines simply aren't. While the debate around whether AI can be an inventor has seen an upswing as machine learning evolves, many were looking to the Thaler decision to settle the discussion once and for all.