The Business of Patents
Software is the redheaded stepchild of intellectual property. It is not well protected by any of patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret law, and the reason is not hard to find – none of those regimes was built with software in mind, and they seem to protect all but what is most important to a […]
Read more →Few questions in patent law have caused clients more frustration than the most basic one of all – whether an invention is even eligible for a patent in the first place. Since the Supreme Court’s decisions in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014), and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., […]
Read more →In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to patent computer-related inventions such as those concerning smart phone and web applications or even more specialized computer programs used in industry. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has been applying the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208, […]
Read more →This has not been a good year for software patents in the United States. Since the Supreme Court issued its decision in June in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, 134 S.Ct. 2347 (2014), the Patent Office has been aggressively rejecting software patent applications and the courts have been invalidating issued software patents for lack of […]
Read more →If business method patents are not dead, after this month’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, they are at least on life support. For a copy of the opinion, click here. In Alice Corp., the Supreme Court affirmed an en banc Federal Circuit holding that patent claims directed to a computerized method of […]
Read more →In a long-awaited decision in Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., et al., the U.S. Supreme Court held on June 13, 2013 that naturally-occurring, isolated genes are not patentable because they do not constitute patentable subject matter under the Patent Statute. With this decision, another chapter has been written in the […]
Read more →Well, we thought so, but now we are not so sure. It seems that the much more is required than the business method itself in order to obtain a patent. The cases suggest that, at a minimum, novel computing features are required. The Federal Circuit’s most recent pronouncement on the issue seems to change little […]
Read more →Growing up in a pre-cable TV world, I played a lot of games such as Monopoly, Clue, Life, Chutes & Ladders, Checkers, Chess and countless others. With all of the cases coming out about statutory subject matter in the last few years, I wondered under what circumstances games could be patented. As it turns out, […]
Read more →The courts continue to wrestle with the difficult question of what types of things can be patented (i.e., what constitutes statutory subject matter). Last week, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued its post-remand opinion in Association for Molecular Pathology, et al., v. United States Patent & Trademark Office, et al. (“Myriad”), ___ F.3d. ___ […]
Read more →In a recent newsletter, we discussed CLS Bank Int’l, et al. v. Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. (Case No. 2011-1301)(Fed. Cir. 2012) and the Federal Circuit’s efforts to provide guidance as to the patentability of software in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Bilski and Prometheus. The CLS decision sought to soften the blow […]
Read more →On April 3 Facebook answered Yahoo’s patent infringement complaint in the pending lawsuit in the Northern District of California. As many people predicted, Facebook also alleged patent infringement claims against Yahoo based on 10 of Facebook’s patents. We discussed Yahoo’s patents and the likelihood that statutory subject matter issues would play a prominent role in […]
Read more →As a follow-up to our original post on the Prometheus case, we did a search to see if there were other patents related to the ones struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, i.e., U.S. Patent No. 6,355,623 and 6,680,302. These patents issued in 2002 and 2004, respectively. In 2006 the same inventors obtained a […]
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