Posts Tagged: "U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals"

Donald Dunner: Looking Back On an IP Icon

Donald Dunner was born in 1931 and spent the first 17 years of his life growing up in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn. In a November 2009 interview published by Washington Lawyer, Dunner recalled his early love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his family’s victory garden during World War II and his attendance at Stuyvesant High School, a well-respected NYC institution with a science-oriented curriculum. Upon graduating Stuyvesant, Dunner attended Purdue University, where he majored in chemical engineering and served as a fraternity president, sophomore class president and student body president. Dunner credited his work in student government with lighting his career path towards the legal profession and his engineering background led naturally to his patent law practice.

The Enfish Decision: Some Light at the End of the Tunnel for Software Patents Since Alice?

What makes the Enfish case particularly interesting is that the court found that the software patent at issue was not even an abstract idea. As such, the inquiry as to patent eligibility did not proceed beyond the abstract idea analysis step. Basically the Enfish court used the wording in Alice to refute post-Alice perceptions that all improvements in computer related technology and/or software inventions are inherently abstract and therefore “are only properly analyzed at the second step of the Alice analysis.” Enfish at 11. This interpretation represents what could be a meaningful shift in the interpretation of software patent validity.