November 25, 1999   
   WHAT'S NEXT; When a Gizmo Can Invent a Gizmo   
   By ANNE EISENBERG   
      
   IF Dr. Frankenstein's monster had published a best seller, who would   
   have gotten the rights to that intellectual property?   
      
   His inventor up in the castle, of course.   
      
   Tough luck for the monster, but these are still early days for   
   intellectual property rights for thinking machines. No one has   
   seriously proposed that a computer should receive a share of the   
   profits from an invention -- at least not yet. But other problems   
   related to the ownership of items invented by computers are already   
   being debated in preparation for the time, probably in about 10 years,   
   when such inventions will be commonplace, said David E. Goldberg, an   
   engineer and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-   
   Champaign.   
      
   Computers are already making inroads in the area of intellectual   
   property as they design antennas, gas turbines and integrated   
   circuits. Much of the work in this field of automatic discovery is   
   preliminary and a lot of it is proprietary and therefore secret, but   
   what can be seen provides tantalizing glimpses of a future in which   
   computers work day and night -- no breaks for lunch -- to come up with   
   original solutions with very little help from their programmers.   
      
   http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04EEDB1F3CF936A   
   5752C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print   
      
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