Appeals Court Makes It Easier To Dump Software Patents

An anonymous reader writes "While software patents are still legal, it appears that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, sometimes known as the nation's 'patent court' has just made a decision that will make it much easier to reject software patents for being mere 'mental processes'" rather than an actual invention. This could allow the Patent Office and the courts to reject many software patents."

Comments

Fixing the symptom

[afidel]

Isn't this trying to fix a broken process by fixing the symptom rather than the cause of the problem? I mean wasn't it just this week that we noticed that the last million patents were granted in 5 years versus the 80 it took for the first million? There's not that much more innovation going on today, we just have more patent abuse going on. Perhaps we need to have a higher fee for patents held by someone other than that original assignees, say $5k per year, this way small inventors don't get hosed, corporations are more willing to give up unneeded patents and will file fewer applications, and the patent office will have more funds to properly vet applications instead of throwing up their hands and rubber stamping everything and letting the courts sort it out.

Irrational ruling

[macraig]

Too bad the submitter didn't read the ARSTechnica article about the same ruling; it was a more impartial analysis and demonstrated how, even though the ruling appears to favor the ultimate abolition of software patents, it's such an illogical ruling that it probably won't really help to serve that purpose, other than perhaps persuading other courts to think more critically about software patents. "Unless it's too complicated for a human to do the math"? Good grief.

Re:Does that qualifies?

[elsurexiste]

...it is a plain good engineering in response to market's demands. Not something I would call an invention or an innovation.

I would say the opposite, actually :) .

Re:Patent Court

[WebManWalking]

As for cutting out juries, no can do, at least not in the US. From http://www.house.gov/house/Constitution/Amend.html here's the 7th amendment, in its entirety:

• In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Re:Missing the point.

[vux984]

I see Invention is 2 separate steps:

1) Identifying a need
2) Answering that need with an invention.

A patent should be a non-trivial / non-obvious response for step TWO.

What I see is a lot of people conflating the difficulty answering the need vs having the spark of genius to identify it in the first place.

A lot of patents are really obvious answers to questions that no one had thought to ask yet.

The little tripod/table thing to keep cheese getting stuck to the lid of a pizza box is an obvious solution to the problem it solves.

Ask any qualified engineer to actually solve that problem, and sticking a little plastic "load bearing tripod or scaffold" on the center of the pizza is a no brainer.

So how did we go for decades without them?

Because it took a moment of "genius" to actually ask the question.

But the patent system isn't supposed to reward people for asking questions... its supposed to reward people for coming up with innovative answers.

As you said: "Most ideas are obvious is retrospect to people who are experts in a field, but its a fallacy to believe it was obvious to those same people BEFORE they saw it."

If the idea for a solution is obvious once the problem is posed its not supposed to be patentable.

That's the problem with patents. If I read an abstract for "a method to suggest movies based on viewing habits of customers on a computer"

Then I'm going to envision a database of movies, and who watched them, and some algorithm for correlating a given customers viewing habits with others similar, and then suggest movies that other people like him watched that he hasn't watched yet. Maybe i'll even take into account how they rated the movies. So there will be a feedback mechanism...

The exact algorithm used to suggest movies might be validly subject to a patent, but not its general structure.

Thus other vendors should be free to implement their own "movie suggesting systems using databases and correlating viewing habits on a computer" without any fear of interference from this patent. Indeed the patent is too broad.

If it instead was a patent on a distance algorithm for relating viewers relative to movies viewed that was actually innovative such that an expert in the field wouldn't suggest its general form without even seeing the answer, that might be a valid patent.

My point is being the first person to think of doing
X shouldn't be rewarded if the method of doing X is obvious to anyone now that you've thought to ask them too.

Re:Missing the point.

[JimFive]

All invention is a mental process.

No it's not. Edison didn't just think, "Hey, I could put a filament in a jar and run electricity through it to make it glow" and patent that. He actually did the work to make a light bulb, and it took a lot of trial and error. It was not just a mental process, but a physical process.

Most ideas are obvious is retrospect to people who are experts in a field, but its a fallacy to believe it was obvious to those same people BEFORE they saw it.

The idea isn't at issue, the implementation is. Obvious, as related to patents, should mean that, given a statement of a problem, an expert in the field would come up with a substantially similar solution. While it is true that figuring out which problem to solve can be the hardest part of invention that is outside the scope of the patent process.
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JimFive