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UK High Court Allows Software Patent Claims

Posted by kdawson on from the there-goes-the-industry dept.

An anonymous reader tips us to a note up on the IPKat blog, written by one of the four law-professor types behind that venture. The British High Court has ruled on appeal that the UK Patent Office must not reject software patent applications out of hand, as it has been doing for some time now. "In a surprising (to this Kat at least) turn of events, the Honourable Mr Justice Kitchin has ruled today that the current UK Patent Office practice of flatly rejecting patent claims to computer program products is wrong... Kitchin J found that the appeals should be allowed. Each application concerned a computer related invention where the examiner had allowed claims to, in effect, a method performed by running a suitably programmed computer and to a computer programmed to carry out the method... The cases were remitted to the [UK Intellectual Property Office] for further consideration in light of the judgment."

5 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. sad news by yakumo.unr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is NOT good news for software innovation in the UK at all.

    Anyone claiming that there hasn't been any innovation in software over the last 10 years because of the lack of ability to patent it in the UK is clearly barking mad.

    Yes, as someone that has worked on generating IP before I strongly believe that people should be paid for their work if they don't wish to donate it for free, but clearly a lack of patents hasn't prevented this either.

    All this will bring eventually is the stifling of the software industry, oh, and more patent trolling, joy.

    1. Re:sad news by MrSteveSD · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I used to work for a small software company targeting the energy sector and we were frequently in competition with much larger firms. Despite their size, we often beat them and won important contracts. Software patents would be a disaster because in these vertical markets you are bound to be violating some of the patents that the larger companies will have in their arsenals.

      The smaller companies are just going to get blown out of the water. It's also going to massively increase small companies costs because they would have to try to patent everything they are doing. Not because they want to attack other companies, but because larger companies might patent it and try to attack them. Even if a big company was violating your patent, it would be stupid to attack them because you will soon discover you are violating lots of their little patents. Patents just protect big companies from smaller faster companies that might come along with new ideas.

      It's obviously a big threat to open source as well.

  2. Well ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    there goes the U.K. software industry. It's unfortunate that the people we most trust to protect our industry and our livelihoods are the most clueless about the very technology we must have in order to do that. The United States is no better in that regard, that's for damn sure. Too bad ... it looks like we're just going to roll over and leave whatever innovation is left in the software field to the Chinese and the Indians.

  3. Once upon a time.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...old people were best suited to make very important decisions. After all, they had the most learning, the most experience, and the most wisdom.

    Now, however, technology moves much faster than the human mind. A person may easily see two or three technological revolutions in his lifetime, each one forcing the rejection of old value systems and the embracing of new perspectives.

    Unfortunately, the older a human mind gets, the less able it is to reject old value systems and embrace new perspectives.

    So now, the decisions of the old-and-powerful wind up causing great harm to the young-and-visionary.

    The thing that REALLY gets me is when young people...people who *should* know better...buy into this we-need-control-to-have-innovation crap.

    If I could put smart in the water, I would.

    1. Re:Once upon a time.... by westlake · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Now, however, technology moves much faster than the human mind. A person may easily see two or three technological revolutions in his lifetime, each one forcing the rejection of old value systems and the embracing of new perspectives.

      Has any of this has ever been true?

      Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 and died in 1922.

      He was born before the transcontinental telegraph and lived to see the beginnings of broadcast radio.

      He was an infant when the wagon trains began moving westward along the Oregon trail and lived to see the steam locaomotive in its twilight and 20,000,000 automobiles on the American road.

      He was a contemprary of John Deere, Erricson, the Roeblings, Edison, George Eastman, Ford, Burpee, Louis Sullivan, Willis Carrier, and a hundred others.

      He was a witness - and often a participant - in technological revolutions that transformed agriculture, manufacturing, engineering, architecture, transportation, communications. transportation, medicine.

      In 1881 he devised a metal detector to probe for the bullet that would kill President Garfield. In 1901 an X-Ray machine might have saved McKinley.