Topic: Australia

The Australian Government will prioritise proposals based on national interest, the energy transition, water usage, workforce development, and research and innovation.

The Parliament of New South Wales has passed a Bill introducing Australia’s first reforms of their kind to the Work Health and Safety framework. This article explores the key reforms and what they mean for organisations using digital tools to allocate, monitor or assess work.

This article examines how Australian financial regulators approach artificial intelligence, summarising key guidance from ASIC, APRA, OAIC and AUSTRAC and setting out practical compliance considerations for firms, boards and executives.

After a somewhat surprising victory in the Federal Court last year (about which we wrote in our article ‘Rise of the Machines’), the hopes that an artificial intelligence machine, nicknamed DABUS, could be named as the inventor on a patent application have now been dashed by the Full Court. In short, the Full Court upheld an appeal by the Commissioner, ultimately finding that Dr Thaler’s patent application had indeed lapsed for failure to name an ‘inventor’ as required by the relevant regulations.

While many of us (in Australia at least), have spent the better part of the last two years locked down, sitting on the couch waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic, judges and patent examiners around the world have been busy grappling with questions ranging from the mundane (legislative interpretation) to the existential (what it means to be ‘a creator’ ).

This decision represents the first judicial step worldwide towards the recognition of AI machines as inventors of patents, and is significant as it may signal a divergence between Australian patent law on this issue and other jurisdictions who have recently taken a different approach, including the EU and the UK.

Australia is well placed to advance digital innovation and the embedding of artificial intelligence over the course of the recovery from the pandemic.