Thursday, August 06, 2015

Sunday, August 02, 2015

Patent Law and the European Union (EU): Software-Related and Business-Method Patents Limited by U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Alice and Other Cases

Patent-happy lawmakers in the European Union (EU) should be paying particular attention to what is happening in the United States in terms of patent law developments regarding software-related and business-method patents.

We missed this earlier due to our massive work on the ancient land survey of Native America by astronomy, but we were gratified to read a perspicacious article by Steven Seidenberg at the ABA Journal in Business-method and software patents may go through the looking glass after Alice decision.

We were light-years ahead of the competition -- i.e the rest of the legal community --  in our inexorable assessment more than 10 years ago and in years thereafter that patents had gotten totally out of hand and that something had to be done by the legal system to avert the economy being totally clogged by patent trolls and patents that had no business being granted.

The Alice case decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and several other patent decisions by SCOTUS have finally led to some long-needed reform of the patent monolith, although much more still needs to be done in the future to stop the pervasively negative influence that patent practices have had on technological innovation in recent years.

As Seidenberg writes:
“It’s a new world order in the aftermath of Alice,” says Dale S. Lazar, a partner in DLA Piper’s Reston, Virginia, office.
... and well it should be.

Read the whole thing here.