In the past Bilski case, the U. S. Supreme Court found the hedge fund program not patent eligible. Now, the Supreme Court is faced with a similar case since it did not set the groundwork on restricting what constitutes something to be patented. The four patents under scrutiny appear to represent very general methods such as a "system for exchanging obligations." A system for exchanging obligations sounds very similar to the method people use to purchase and sell stock depending on the definition of "obligation." Already, the Alice group's claim did not look very promising.
In the federal circuit, the decision was not unanimous but agreed the patent claims to be invalid. This decision did bring concern since opponents wanted the claims to be upheld so any business method could be patented and profitable. This decision is crucial since it points out the issue of software patents (Do software products fit the patent definition?). Patents are supposed to be novel, practical and not obvious. For the Alice patents, the software appeared to novel and practical but the non-obvious aspect is debatable. A system to exchange obligations is not so unique except the process of risk assessment.
The problems posed in this court case has strong relevance to smartphone software. For operating system like Android and iOS, a lack of support for software patents could be harmful in the future. While the federal court did not lay out general guidelines, it provided little support for software patents. Potentially, NPE could find this court decision to be murky enough for attacking the patents of companies of providing smartphone software.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/02/cls-bank-v-alice-is-not-about-death-of.html
It seems like we're in a lot of gray area here. Who gets define what is "not obvious"? I feel like some of the patent guidelines that are laid out are rather subjective instead of objective like they need to be. These cases are never black and white. The crazy thing is, even the colors black and white are not black and white. What's one color to one person may be a different color to another - and that's much more clear cut than whether something is obvious or patentable.
ReplyDeleteSoftware patents are a challenging area. It's basically like saying you want to patent a code? Then again, patenting code could be too general, unless maybe a specific algorithm has been developed which is not general at all. Then again, what does it mean too be too broad or general? Finally, if software patents gain more prominence, then how can they be enforced? When we use software, all we see is the user interface and GUI, we never see the code. So, how can you find out if a software patent is being infringed upon? Or is it that parts of the GUI are patented? This brings up some very interesting questions, which need to be further investigated to further the scope of software patents.
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