Business methods are no longer patentable.
This should be a longer post, but I'm busy with something else, and I'm late talking about this one, anyway. In short, the Federal Circuit -- whose decisions in patent matters have been regularly smacked down by the Supreme Court for the past several years -- has ruled that business methods are no longer to be considered as "patent-eligible subject matter."
Not sure what this means about State Street Bank. Have a read at the In re Bilski decision for yourself and see how expressly the court tossed out business method patents.
I think this is good, but keep in mind that I also think that software shouldn't be patentable subject matter. (For different reasons -- software, at least, can be protected under copyright.) I don't know if the applicants will file a petition for cert. with the Supreme Court. It's been almost amusing not to guess whether the Supreme Court will overturn the Federal Circuit patent cases lately, but to guess just exactly how they will overturn them.
More later, if I get around to it. I have a pile of non-IP-related classwork to plow through during Thanksgiving break.
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2 comments:
Well, this is good news.
This is very good news.
One hopes it will be a new court by the time the appeal gets to it. (Does anyone else besides me predict a wave of retirements from the Supreme Court on January 21, 2009?)
Does this mean MicroSoft's patent of "double click" is out the window?
Depends on whether "double click" was patented as software or a business method or something else. In re Bilski doesn't rule that software is not patentable.
I'm gonna read it more carefully this afternoon and see if I can't figure out what's going on. The Groklaw blog has been talking about it a lot, too.
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