A new patent ruling is likely to have a big impact on business method and software patents.
The U.S court of appeals upheld a decision of the U.S patent office that denied a patent from an applicant named Bernard L Bilsky, an owner of a small company called Weatherwise. The patent application comprises a mathematical model that enables managing bad weather risks in the commodity market.
The Bilsky patent was not tied to any form of technology and had some serious obviousness problems thus rendering it to be a perfect test case for those interested in eliminating the possibility of business method and software patents.
The court ruled that the Bilsky patent has no machine or transformation of a substance involved. In effect, their patent application didn't involve what the court called
Posted by: Ophir Tal in USPTO, software patent, Software, politics, Patents Opposition, Patents, Patently-O, Patentability, Patent Prosecution, Patent Legislation, patent, Internet Patent, intellectual property, cyberlaw, Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit, COMPUTER CONTROLLED SOFTWARE INTEGRATED INVENTIONS, claims, CAFC, blogging on
Jul 22, 2008
Prof. John F. Duffy analyses at Patently-O the probable position of the USPTO towards software patents as presented in a series of cases. Specifically, patentable subject matter must result in a physical transformation of an article that is tied to a particular machine. A general purpose computer may probably not be regarded as a particular machine, and data structures and numbers (e.g. webpage rankings) may probably neither be regarded as articles nor as being physically transformed. Well – some news for the software industry.
The analysis is recommended as being not only thorough but also quite easy to read.
Microsoft appealed an earlier jury verdict dated last April, maintaining that Microsoft has infringed a number of Alcatel-Lucent's patents.
On Appeal, Judge Marilyn L. Huff refused to reconsider the April jury verdict and ordered Microsoft to pay for additional damages.
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