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The Post-Bilski Era Gets Underway
bfwebster writes "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for 'evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules' (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilski (which decision we discussed here). Here's the entire text of the appeals decision: 'In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.' It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards start getting applied to software-related patents."
For us non-laywers and not interested enough to spend time looking up those court cases but interested enough to understand what the significance of this is, can someone please translate the summary into plain English?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
As a software examiner I can say that this honestly doesn't change a lot in our art unit. If the implementation could occur in someone's head then no physical transformation takes place (i.e. software steps that aren't claimed to be on a computer.)
There are only a small amount of applications this effects and it's very easy to overcome, although I unfortunately can't go into much more depth than that.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
It's a virtual invention and gets no protection. Patents after Bilski pretty much have to be tied to a particular machine or change something in meat-space.
either legally or conceptually. This identical issue was settled by the courts almost 150 years ago, when the "music industry" of the time was up in arms about piracy of music for player pianos.
Industry argued that the paper rolls should be patentable, because they constituted physical items that controlled a physical machine. The courts ruled (quite properly, in my opinion) that the physical form of the music is irrelevant; it might be possible, for example, to make a machine that could read music directly off the paper it was written on. Does that make it fundamentally a "different" product or work from the original? The answer was unequivocally "NO".
The same holds for written vs. compiled software: there is no fundamental difference between the results of software that is run in realtime by an interpreter (which reads the source code directly), and the results produced by the same program when compiled. If the interpreter and compiler are constructed properly, the output is identical. Therefore there is no legal (or moral, or ethical, or logical) difference. For all practical purposes they are the SAME.
It is precisely because industry has managed, after all this time, to finally get the courts to be sympathetic to the position that software should be patentable that we are having all these troubles. During the long period when it was understood and accepted that software was a copyright issue rather than a patent issue, such problems seldom arose. Now they are everywhere. Also, software patents have a chilling effect on innovation; we have seen this time and again, even some really egregious examples. It is clear by now that software patents have very little if any societal benefit, in proportion to the harm that they cause.