The Supreme Court yesterday handed down a decision in a landmark case, known as Alice Corp v CLS Bank. Here’s a link to the decision.
In a nutshell, Alice Corp was issued a patent for a computer implemented payment system. CLS Bank argued that the patent was invalid because it took an existing system and simply implemented “well known” steps on a computer.
The Supreme Court agreed with CLS and said that patents are not valid if they generically implement an existing abstract idea on a computer.
This could have the effect of invalidating a number of existing “method” type patents.
Software makers had watched the case closely amid concern that a broad high-court ruling against Alice could have rendered even highly inventive software patents vulnerable to attack.
BSA, a trade association representing Microsoft Corp. and other software makers, said the opinion “will help everyone distinguish abstract ideas that are not patentable from real software inventions that are.”
The decision avoided broad new pronouncements and stuck closely to precedent, but observers said it could strike a blow against a proliferation of weaker software patents.
It will likely be a while until the effects of this decision shake out.
Just because the steps to solving a problem are well know it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s obvious or even easy to figure out how to replicate those steps in a software system.
Actually, by any reasonably competent software developer, it does. If one of the steps proves to be particularly difficult and not obvious, then a software patent may be valid on that step itself, but certainly not on the entire method.
Finally, the beginnings of common sense. They need to go further and invalidate all anticompetitive and monopolistic software patents.
So? That is called “troubleshooting” or “figuring out a problem” and doesn’t give you the right to use legal force to prevent others from using their brains to do the same.
Once the solution becomes public it’s impossible to tell if you came up with the same solution yourself or if you copied it.
You said the same thing as I did, but with a lot more words and a contradiction from one sentence to the next.
You must be a lawyer. 😛
All patents are anticompetitive and monopolistic, genius. That’s the point of patents.
yes but many of these patents are very very very vague.
“computer based inventory and point of sale system” should not be a patent worthy idea. if i spell out the steps by which this system will work, sure, but not the mere idea of having one.
That’s where much of software IP gets tricky. Cause your solution might be the same basic steps but via different code cause you are using a different language or your different subroutines etc. And that can put it into copyright protection but not necessarily patent.
That’s just the summary of the patent which holds no legal weight.
The claims describe what is/should be protected and must describe the (parts of the) solution that is patented.
Nah, it’s pretty clear. People just like to pretend it’s not.
My new algorithm to solve the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time should be exclusive to me and I deserve to be paid for its usage no matter the language or other implementation details.
My new implementation in Swift of an old algorithm to solve that same problem should be protected by copyright but I can claim nothing from others doing the same.
Invalidate all of them, then. Do you think it’d be possible to have patent trolls without patents?
Why should it be exclusive to you? What if someone else independently comes up with the same ideas?
Civilization is advanced by the spreading and sharing of ideas, not by the creation of artificial profit by forcing others to pay up or get shut down. That is increasingly a troll’s game, and a power used by large corporations to protect themselves from competition, and I don’t see how anybody can support that.
And imprison all the fools.
We should start with you.
Civilisation is advanced by smart hardworking people, not by entitled brats such as yourself.
They deserve to be rich and you deserve to be ignored.
copyright law can easily determine if you copied their solution — if you copied the code, you violated copyright.
patents aren’t needed when copyright already protects plagiarism.
of course you shouldn’t be protected if the implementation varies! ideas shouldn’t be protected, only implementation. ideas are cheap.
that’s not what your mom said.
nah, your mom.