Defining the Computer: Court Attempts to Decide When Software is Patentable
By Karla Robinson
August 3, 2012
August 3, 2012
- “At root, the judges of the Federal Circuit appear confused about how computers work,” and, “it’s making a mess of patent law,” reports Ars Technica, explaining how the definition of “computer” has judges making conflicting decisions.
- In order to receive patent protection, inventions cannot have “abstract ideas” or “mental processes.” However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit seems to be having a hard time drawing that line, according to the article.
- The Court supported a patent protecting Alice Corporation’s idea of using a computer to do a specific kind of financial transaction. A few weeks later, Bancorp Services was denied its patent for “using a computer to manage a particular type of life insurance policy,” the article states.
- The Court explained the discrepancy: “…the use of a computer in an otherwise patent-ineligible process for no more than its most basic function — making calculations or computations — fails to circumvent the prohibition against patenting abstract ideas and mental processes.”
- “To salvage an otherwise patent-ineligible process, a computer must be integral to the claimed invention, facilitating the process in a way that a person making calculations or computations could not,” the court continued. “The computer required by some of Bancorp’s claims is employed only for its most basic function, the performance of repetitive calculations, and as such does not impose meaningful limits on the scope of those claims.”
- In contrast, computer use was considered an integral part in the Alice Corp. invention, which was therefore upheld.
- “This doesn’t make much sense,” Ars Technica argues. “Every computer application, no matter how sophisticated, consists of nothing more than ‘the performance of repetitive calculations.'”
No Comments Yet
You can be the first to comment!
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.