Posts Tagged: "software patents"

The Australian Full Federal Court recently handed down its decision in Research Affiliates LLC v Commissioner of Patents. The decision is an important addition to Australian case law concerning the patentability of business methods and software. Judges Kenny, Bennett, and Nicholas ruled that the Appellant’s claimed computer implemented method for generating an index for use in securities trading was unpatentable as an abstract idea. The Court held that “[t]he claimed method in this case clearly involves what may well be an inventive idea, but it is an abstract idea. The specification makes it apparent that any inventive step arises in the creation of the index as information and as a scheme. There is no suggestion in the specification or the claims that any part of the inventive step lies in the computer implementation.

While there can be disingenuous arguments made about the abstractness of a media product or a sponsor message, who in their right mind could ever even suggest that “an Internet website” is abstract? Is “an Internet website” abstract? Is the “general public” abstract? Is a consumer abstract? Contemplate these questions as you, a member of the general public continues to read this article on this Internet website! We apparently have jumped the shark and turned the law of software patent claims into a useless, ridiculous philosophy assignment that asks whether something that clearly exists doesn’t exist. So are you, a consuming member of the general public who reads Internet websites real, or are you abstract?

IBM’s technology for molecular profiling in cancer treatments is only one of many technologies for data analysis developed by the company with specific applications to medical fields. A few patent applications in this field caught our eyes today, including one directed at a technology serving to help uncover instances of health care fraud. Programs for the temporal analysis of electronic medical records in clinical settings have been described in the IBM’s filing of U.S. Patent Application No. 20140257847, entitled Hierarchical Exploration of Longitudinal Medical Events. The computer program product that would be protected by this patent application is designed to determine and group medical events which are co-occurring within a time period to minimize the number of sets of medical data and identify patterns within the medical events.

The consequences of SCOTUS decisions are really severe. The U.S. is no longer a favorable jurisdiction for many biotech patents, medical devices and software. What that’s going to mean is companies are going to move. We’ve known this throughout history. Companies locate where the laws are the best for them. If you’re an innovator you’re going to go where the patent laws are the strongest. And that’s why the U.S. has dominated in these industries. We’re number one in biotech is because of Chakrabarty, which has basically been overruled. Prior to Myriad you would have said the ruling of Chakrabarty was this: if there’s human intervention it’s patent eligible, but now you can’t say that because there was human intervention in Myriad, which they acknowledged, and still the claims were patent ineligible. We know companies will move to jurisdictions with more favorable laws…

“[F]or a living I reverse engineer code and testify in court. Yet I could not reverse engineer this code. Every time I touched it to make some kind of change to test it, the whole thing broke. And I finally had to write the code completely from scratch because this open source code was such a kludge, such a mess, that it was impossible for me to figure out… [T]here’s a bunch of issues here and maybe some of them are that programmers nowadays aren’t well trained and they’re not well disciplined in programming techniques… [they] write code as quickly as you can, throw it out there, people will debug it for you. So first of all maybe we need to be teaching more discipline to programmers. We need to… convince them, hey, now that you’ve really gone through a rigorous program it’s not just okay to throw stuff together but create something with a structure that’s debuggable, that’s understandable, and that is innovative and patentable.”

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Bob Zeidman, the president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, who is also the president and founder of Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation, Zeidman is an software expert. In fact, in addition to consulting with lawyers and technology companies, he is an testifying and consulting expert witness. The premise of our conversation was the upheaval in the patent industry thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. In part 1 of our conversation we discussed the decision and ways that attorneys can build a specification to satisfy the Alice standard. In part 2 of our 3 part discussion, which appears below, we wrap up our discussion of the Alice decision and dive into a discussion about the fact that many in the computer science world don’t believe what they do to be particularly innovative or even special.

Modern software tools allow people to turn fairly abstract ideas into reality. That’s the beauty of software. You can start describing things in such a high level and yet output what I consider an innovative invention. And so how do we separate abstract ideas that are unpatentable from an actual software implementation is going to be really difficult. And I don’t think this ruling helps…. One of the reasons there’s an explosion in software patents is that it’s really easy to create a software patent without having written the code. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But I do know, I have seen patents where there have been code snippets that don’t work. And I think that’s one thing to be careful of.

A troubling aspect of the analysis in the Alice opinion is the suggestion that an invention, once patent eligible, can become patent ineligible simply based on the passage of time and public adoption. Dialogue in the oral argument as well as statements in the Court’s opinion suggest this line of reasoning, which arguably originated in Bilski, has become an accepted principal . . . An invention may initially be susceptible to patenting but may later become ineligible for patenting (as opposed to becoming unpatentable due to lack of novelty or obviousness) as it becomes more adopted, ubiquitous, successful or commonplace. Ubiquity, it would seem, is now the touchstone not only for patentability but for patent eligibility too.

Over the last several days I have heard of an alarming trend from the United States Patent and Trademark Office — Patent Examiners are canceling Notices of Allowance and yanking previously granted claims back into prosecution while citing the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank. In some instances granted claims are being pulled back into prosecution only to be rejected as lacking patent eligible subject matter even after the issue fee has been paid. This is an alarming trend that seems to be building steam as virtually everyone who operates in this space is now seeing this happen and/or they are seeing supplemental office actions issued where the pending office action never rejected claims based on patent eligibility grounds.

With the Supreme Court’s most recent foray into the patent-eligibility world in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, we now have a complete and utter disaster as to what data processing claims can (or more unfortunately cannot) survive scrutiny by Our Judicial Mount Olympus under 35 U.S.C. § 101. I once had respect for Justice Thomas’ view on patent law jurisprudence, having considered his substandard opinion in Myriad on the patent-eligibility of certain “isolated” DNA claims to be an “isolated” aberration. But having now read his mind-boggling Opinion for the Court in Alice Corp., I’ve now thrown my previously “cheery” view of Thomas’ understanding of patent law jurisprudence completely into the toilet. I have even less kind words to say about the three Justices that signed onto Justice Sotomayor’s disingenuous concurring opinion that accepts retired Justice Steven’s equally disingenuous suggestion in Bilski that 35 U.S.C. § 273 (in which Congress acknowledged implicitly, if not explicitly the patent-eligibility of “business methods” under 35 U.S.C. § 101) is a mere “red herring.” See Section 273 is NOT a Red Herring: Steven’s Disingenuous Concurrence in Bilski.

He says he has seen the below form paragraph twice within a week. Most alarming, in one case the form paragraph came in the form of a supplemental office action, but the original office action, which was outstanding, didn’t have any patent eligibility rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101… Clearly this form paragraph does not come from the initial guidance the USPTO sent to examiners. In that initial guidance Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy, Andrew Hirshfeld, told patent examiners that “the basic inquiries to determine subject matter eligibility remain the same as explained in MPEP 2106(I).” Therefore, USPTO told patent examiners that while the framework of the analysis had changed the substance of the analysis had not changed.

The Supreme Court’s Alice decision has again left the IP bar without a clear, repeatable test to determine when exactly a software (or computer-implemented) claim is patentable versus being simply an abstract idea “free to all men and reserved exclusively to none,” Funk Brothers Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U.S. 127, 130 (1948). This is perhaps not surprising as Alice is a case more about so-called “business method” patents than software patents! (In fact, three justices in a succinct, 116-word concurring opinion indicated that they would impose a per se ban on patenting business methods!) With respect to software patents, however, we still find ourselves with a myriad of USPTO Section 101 guidelines, flowcharts and presentation slides – the latest of which is a March 4, 2014, 19-pager which may very well get fatter after Alice!

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is a continuation of Alice, the Illusory Death of Software Patents. We can return to the beginning of the analysis and revisit preemption. As stated, the Court sees § 101 as protecting the big ideas that are fundamental to commerce, science, and technology, patents that would preempt and “block” innovation. The Court realizes that every patent…