Posts Tagged: "Software"

The Case for Software Patentability, An Interview with David Kappos

KAPPOS: ”Companies like Microsoft and Apple and GE — all of whom are members [of the Partnership for American Innovation] along with IBM, Ford, DuPont and Pfizer as well as smaller companies like Many Worlds and Second Sight — all of them are engaged in the hard work of making major, I’ll call it bone-grinding innovations. Second Sight is literally coming up with electro mechanical and implantable human interfacing medical technology that enables blind people to see. And like you said, Gene, serious software development involving lots of super smart people and putting in tremendous amount of time with a lot of specialized expertise, devising solutions to very important problems. You know, enabling blind people to see — it’s hard to imagine a more tangible, practical and important problem than that.”

PTAB Wonderland: Statistics show Alice PTAB interpretation not favorable to patent applicants

The United States Supreme Court is commonly known to resolve difficult issues of law. Yet, Alice v. CLS Bank[ii], last year’s unanimous Supreme Court decision, has caused confusion about whether computer-implemented business methods and software innovations are patentable under 35 U.S.C. §101. The question of patentability of software-related innovations – even those involving merely implementations of business-related innovations – seemed…

Lifting the Fog on ‘Software Patents’ – Eliminate that Meaningless Term

Clearly, one does not get a patent on software or a computer program. Software, just like electronic circuits, or steam, or solar energy, or gears, or rubber bands — to name a few — is only a means to an end. Under the USPTO long time guidelines one receives a patent only if a) there is an invention b) if there is a proper Specification (an adequate disclosure to one skilled-in-the-art) and c) the so-called invention in the patent application is not abstract and not obvious.

A Strategy for Protecting Software Claims from Invalidation Under the Algorithm Requirement

In general, the courts distinguish between functions and algorithms, and they require patent applicants to disclose algorithms to cure perceived deficiencies in functions. The problem with this line of reasoning is that both algorithms and functions under 35 U.S.C. § 112(f) are composed of the same things: steps. So the result of the algorithm requirement is to simply make patent applicants “fix” one step by specifying more steps. Accordingly, if the algorithm requirement is taken to its logical conclusion, then each step would be fixed with more steps, and each of those steps would be fixed with even more steps, like Russian dolls. Instead, the courts do not take the algorithm to its logical conclusion and, instead, only require a single layer: the original step and the further steps (i.e., algorithm) for it. This is arbitrary, confusing for patent applicants and examiners, and a poorly calibrated solution to concerns about software patents.

IBM recent R&D focuses on software solutions for healthcare, energy grid renewables

IBM is involved with the development of medical technologies for fields other than oncology, as is evidenced by the issue of U.S. Patent No. 9064306, which is titled Bidirectional Blood Vessel Segmentation. The method for segmenting blood vessels protected here involves receiving an angiogram frame, processing the angiogram frame by applying a Butterworth bandpass filter to suppress high and low frequency background noise, performing both bottom-up filtering and top-down segmentation of the angiogram frame and repeating that process until the results of the top-down segmentation from consecutive iterations equals or exceeds a threshold value. This process is useful for the analysis of angiogram images captured through cardiac catheterization as it can reduce the amount of feedback noise in those images.