You Can No Longer Patent Thin Air
In what could be seen as a victory for doers, and a bit of a setback for thinkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has made a rather significant ruling on what is and isn’t patentable.
The court ruled against a man who was attempting to patent “a method for hedging against weather-related effects on businesses.” As a result, infamous patents like Amazon’s “one-click” shopping concept may no longer be valid, because they don’t either “involve a particular machine” or “physically transform anything.”
In essence, the ruling means that business ideas in and of themselves aren’t patentable.
In addition to Amazon’s “one-click” patent, which is the concept of purchasing something via credit card by just clicking a single website link, Friendster’s patents on social networking also come to mind as being unpatentable based on this judgement.
That patent covers a “system, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks” and a “method of inducing content uploads in a social network,” amongst other claims.
Photo by Amazon.com.
Jaclyn on November 4th, 2008 6:25 pm
I think it’s a good idea to set limits on what can and can not be patened, especially when it come’s to such thing’s as internet shopping. I mean, if there is no limit on this then yeah…someone could try to patent “air”, “grass”, etc. anything that they can get their hands on, and with all the inventions today, and all the internet shoppers, how can we say who get’s to patent such a thing as internet shopping?
cassy on November 18th, 2008 2:27 am
I agree with Jacklyn, they should really limit or have a requirements on what can be patented. Some people are only making fun…
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