After a mysterious and lengthy disappearance, the historic patent documents for the Wright Brothers' groundbreaking flying machine have finally resurfaced and are now at home in the National Archives ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. Isaac Merritt Singer of New York, New ...

This media is in the public domain (free of copyright restrictions). You can copy, modify, and distribute this work without contacting the Smithsonian. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's ...

There’s a strong case to be made for allowing machines to invent other machines. We recently examined the logic and legality behind the notion of artificial intelligence (AI) gaining the ability to ...

With AI patents increasing 400% over the past decade, businesses, regulators and philosophers ask where AI inventions will go next and how best to answer ethical questions of ownership and liability ...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a decision on April 22 that a machine cannot be named an inventor for a patent, because inventorship is limited to a natural person.

The Federal Circuit's recent decision in Recentive Analytics, Inc. v. Fox Corp. (April 18, 2025) has garnered a lot of attention. This is not surprising: It hits on hot topics such as machine learning ...

What are the arguments against allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to patent inventions? Following initial surveys of the issue, in our last piece we examined the arguments in favor of machine ...