"Paper mills" come for IP rights

I recently came across this utterly fascinating article (and see the underlying journal reprint here) describing what appears to be a recent extension of the practice of “paper mills” - where fake (or at least dubious) scientific papers are published for the purposes of driving up author and journal metrics. Some of these paper mills will sell the opportunity to be a named author.

The rise of LLMs and similar AI has made it far easier for paper mills to quickly generate superficially-plausible journal articles (although sometimes the accompanying images are slightly suspect).

Now it seems the practice has reached the world of IP rights, with offers to sell authorship rights on UKIPO Design Registrations. What appear to be AI-generated bizarre products are submitted as UK designs, with the intention of allowing the authors to include these “design patents” among their research metrics. Given that UK Registered Designs go through a relatively quick formal examination process, this seems an inexpensive and straightforward route to manipulate the metrics.

The researchers also investigated which firms are acting as representatives for these applications. To take two example design registrations:

"Each of these designs were filed on behalf of their inventors by two firms (i.e. “representatives”): Firm A and Firm E. Firm A is registered in the UK at its claimed address but does not have any identifiable web presence. Firm E is not registered in the UK at its claimed address but does have a website and claims to be an IP firm based in India. The address listed by Firm E on its design filings is the registration address for more than 5,000 active UK companies"

The authors also conclude that there seem to be very clear differences in the nature of designs filed by these “suspicious” firms when compared with those filed by what they term “legitimate” firms. Might the UKIPO consider adopting automated systems to flag up suspicious design applications? However, inevitably this would require resources which are already being diverted from legitimate applications by these fake designs.

This is a very worrying development, and I hope that it does not lead to IP offices becoming overwhelmed with AI-generated slop to the detriment of legitimate users. It also appears important to take action against these “suspicious” IP firms, although this too may prove an elusive target given the ease with which a UK business address may be acquired.