it must be an invention (e.g. discovery of laws of nature or mathematics don't count)
it must be novel and nonobvious
it must be useful (there is a more restrictive patent for purely decorative designs and art)
It used to be the case that software and business models were held to be like mathematics, and so was considered unpatentable. Patent lawyers spent considerable energy translating an otherwise unpatentable innovation into patentable forms.
This changed when a couple of bad lawyers mistakenly filed important patents without masking the hardware as software, the business model as a machine, etc. They got lucky, though: supreme court decisions reversed the prohibition against software patents, and (interestingly) held that there never was a prohibition against business model patents.
Today, all useful innovations are potentially patentable. The difficulty of getting a patent, and, much more importantly, having it upheld, depend on the novelty and nonobviousness of the innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
- it must be an invention (e.g. discovery of laws of nature or mathematics don't count)
- it must be novel and nonobvious
- it must be useful (there is a more restrictive patent for purely decorative designs and art)
It used to be the case that software and business models were held to be like mathematics, and so was considered unpatentable. Patent lawyers spent considerable energy translating an otherwise unpatentable innovation into patentable forms.This changed when a couple of bad lawyers mistakenly filed important patents without masking the hardware as software, the business model as a machine, etc. They got lucky, though: supreme court decisions reversed the prohibition against software patents, and (interestingly) held that there never was a prohibition against business model patents.
Today, all useful innovations are potentially patentable. The difficulty of getting a patent, and, much more importantly, having it upheld, depend on the novelty and nonobviousness of the innovation.
doug.
ridgway@winehq.com