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
In the In Re Bilski case, the US Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has made a decision about what it takes for a process claim to be patentable.
On October 30, 2008, the United States Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has made a much anticipated decision in a case concerning a business method patent, the so-called In Re Bilski case.
The decision is expected to be of vital importance to the validity of process claims in general, but especially to software/computer-implemented processes and business methods. Concurrently with the fact that the decision tightens up the conditions for getting approved typically software patents and business method patents, at any rate it also verifies that it is possible to patent that kind of things at all.
The decision discusses what it takes
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