Posts Tagged: "Business Methods"

At 2pm ET on November 9, 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled the session to a close announcing that the case had now been submitted. The arguments were good, and the Court was most assuredly hot, peppering both sides with question after question seeking to probe the issues. It is clear that the Supreme Court did their homework and spent no time gravitating to the weak points of the parties.

If you are going to read only one of the briefs in this case I would strongly recommend the Medtronic amicus brief, which was filed in support of neither party. Much of the Medtronic brief is devoted to explaining what the company does, some of the key medical innovations created by the company, why these innovations have helped improve the quality of health care for real people, and what technologies they will no longer be able to seek patent protection for, which will all but certainly lead to less medical innovation, which is hardly good for society.

The United States Supreme Court granted cert. in Bilski v. Doll. This means that the last chapter on business methods and software has not yet been written, which could be good news or bad news depending upon your particular take. I have wondered out loud about allowing software patents as patentable subject matter, which I think is the right thing to do myself.

Ever since this decision was rendered there has been rampant speculation as to what Bilski means and how it will be interpreted. As one who works in this area and one with my own patent application pending in class 705, I was greatly interested both professionally and personally. Thankfully, I can report that it does not seem as if Bilski is turning out to be the impediment to patentability that many feared. In fact, based on what is going on at the USPTO one could make a convincing argument that it is actually getting easier to obtain patents that related to software and computer related processes.

Just over two weeks ago I wrote an article explaining that quality review at the USPTO was changing for the better.  Shortly after this article published I received a telephone call from the Office of Public Affairs at the USPTO.  We chatted about this article and one thing lead to another and ultimately I spoke with Acting Commissioner for Patents,…

In the Arrhythmia case the invention in question was directed to the analysis of electrocardiographic signals in order to determine certain characteristics of heart function. In essence, the invention was a monitoring device. It had been discovered that 15% to 25% of heart attack victims are at high risk for ventricular tachycardia, which can be treated by the administration of drugs. Unfortunately, the drugs used have undesirable and dangerous side effects, which led the inventor to come up with a monitoring device capable of determining which heart attack victims were at the highest risk for ventricular tachycardia.

Since the United States Supreme Court first addressed the patentability of computer software in Gottschalk v. Benson the law surrounding the patentability of software has changed considerably, leaving many to wonder whether software is patentable at all. Originally in Benson, the Supreme Court decided that software was not patentable, but then later retracted the blanket prohibition against patenting software.

Microsoft is trying to patent a metered pay-as-you-go computing experience, which would give Microsoft exclusive rights to giving away computers for free, or virtually for free, and then charging a user fee for every hour the computer is used. What makes this application scary is not just the fact that Microsoft filed it, but that Microsoft has such a dominant position in the market that this could realistically become the future standard.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the chief patent law court in the United States, today issued an Order setting In re Bilski for rehearing en banc, which means that it will be reheard by the entire court.  The original hearing in Bilski was on October 1, 2007, in front of a three judge panel, which…