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USPTO Demands EFF Censor Its Comments On Patentable Subject Matter
An anonymous reader sends this report from TechDirt:
As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which it basically said that merely doing something on a general purpose computer didn't automatically make it patentable. ... However, the USPTO apparently was offended at parts of the EFF's comment submission, claiming that it was an "improper protest." Protest or not, the EFF denies in strong terms that the original comments were improper.
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That if (redacted) (redacted) then (redacted) because (redacted) (redacted) (redacted). Really.
In the PDF, there is a table in the PDF of the EFF's response where it compares the issued patent against the rejected patent at the Supreme Court. The wording is amazingly similar.
The significant change between the two is patents swapping the words "banking transaction" for the use of "a credit or charge account", and then updating the rest of the text appropriately. If you do not understand what the EFF's point is, then take a look at the table. It does not take much imagination to see that the patent at stake in the Supreme Court case, and the newly issued patent, are almost identical.
I dunno, it seems to me that an RFC is rather the best place to comment on a subject.
You could say they even requested it.
I'm not a big fan of the USPTO, but I'm not convinced that they are out of line here. The EFF comment makes mention of a specific patent applicant who is known to be highly litigious, and specifically argues that the USPTO should be particularly skeptical of applications from that entity because of the enormous cost to others of patents being inappropriately granted to that specific entity.
This is an entirely reasonable thing to say, but the PTO's point is that it's not an appropriate thing to say in the context of a request for comments on something else. The request for comments was on a new set of guidelines the PTO had issued, not on a patent application from the entity to which the EFF referred.
At the same time, it perfectly illustrates that the new guidelines are inadequate since they approved a patent that is almost identical to one the courts specifically ruled invalid.