Ciarán O'Riordan has put together a summary of the judgement:
"There will be debate about how far this ruling goes, but the direction it goes in is clear: 100% in the direction of abolishing software patents"
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Alice_v._CLS_Bank_ruling_by_US_Supreme_Court_on_19_June_2014
In mobilità
Il
giorno 19/giu/2014, alle ore 20:12, Stefano Quintarelli <stefano@quintarelli.it>
ha scritto:
Supreme
Court deals blow to computer patents in 9-0 ruling
By
Jeff John Roberts
Jun
19 2014
<http://gigaom.com/2014/06/19/supreme-court-deals-blow-to-computer-patents-in-9-0-ruling/>
SUMMARY:
A
new Supreme Court decision will cut down the number of
computer-related patents, but will not, as some had hoped,
eliminate software patents altogether.
The
Supreme Court declared Thursday that a patent related to a
centuries old financial concept was invalid since it was an
abstract idea, even though the concept was implemented
through a computer.
The
court’s unanimous ruling serves to narrow the type of
“inventions” that can be eligible for patents, and amounts
to a minor victory for the technology industry and other
companies that have long claimed about software-related
patents.
The
case itself involved a patent for escrow services held by
Alice Corp, a shell company regarded by many as a patent
troll. The patent’s validity was challenged by CLS Bank,
which runs a currency transaction network, and which argued
that Alice’s patent simply described a settlement mechanism
that banks have used for centuries.
“We
conclude that the method claims, which merely require
generic computer implementation, fail to transform that
abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention,” wrote
Justice Clarence Thomas.
Thomas
also cautioned against allowing patents that relied on “the
draftsman’s art” to turn abstract notions into monopolies on
ideas.
The
ruling appears to call into question the validity of
thousands of patents which describe a familiar idea, but
rely on a “method” of implementing it with a computer.
Although
the decision does not unequivocally declare software patents
to be invalid, it expresses deep skepticism of “simply
appending conventional steps” to an abstract idea in an
effort to make it patent-eligible.
The
opinion does suggest, however, that patents may still be
obtained that “improve the functioning of the computer
itself or effect an improvement in any other technology or
technical field.” It also cautions that the goal of
preventing patents that cover abstract ideas should not
“swallow all of patent law.”
Thomas’s
opinion drew heavily on the reasoning from another recent
case, called Myriad Genetics, in which the Supreme Court
invalidated patents over human genes. Both opinions hold
that applying familiar techniques to non-patentable things
does not result in a patentable invention.
The
Alice case amounted to unfinished business of sorts for the
Supreme Court. In 2010, the court addressed the same issues
in a case called Bilksi, but failed to provide any clarity
about what type of subject matter can — and cannot — be
patented, which in turn produced another rat’s nest of lower
court opinions.
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