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Patent Office Tightens Screws On Software Patents
The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI), a key panel within the Patent Office, has tightened the rules for American software patents, arstechnica reports.
The recently-released decision builds on last year’s landmark ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the case of In Re Bilski. In that case, the Federal Circuit focused on business method patents and had left key questions about the patentability of software-related inventions unanswered.
The new ruling will give thousands of American patent examiners guidance about how to apply the holdings of Bilski in software patent cases.
However, the decision may have a short shelf life: the Supreme Court is due to weigh in on Bilski in the Spring. If the Supreme Court overrules key provisions of the Federal Circuit’s Bilski ruling, the BPAI will need to go back to the drawing board once again.
That may be a headache for the Patent Office, which may be forced to rewrite the software patent rules yet again. But it could give the rest of us some of the clarity we so desperately need.
Photo by USPTO.
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anonymous on December 20th, 2010 9:07 pm
That was very informative and well written. I look forward for further posts from you. Recently I came across an article titled “A functionality based approach for assessing patentability of software” which I felt, is quite interesting and informative. I would like to bring your kind attention to the above mentioned article. Below given is an excerpt of the article.
“The whole idea of software is to avoid making specific hardware for every application. We came up with software to be able to dynamically create a new “machine” out of a standard hardware. A software allows the “new” machine to perform a “new” function based on the instructions as part of the software.
Now, saying that a software invention to be claimed must have a specific machine limitation is like asking the inventor to come up with corresponding hardware embodiment for the software based invention. It really defeats the purpose of…” read more at http://www.sinapseblog.com/2010/12/functionality-based-approach-for.html
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