John F. Duffy of Patent Law Blog has an interesting post explaining the ramifications of a recent ruling by the USPTO’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. Basically, the USPTO has been arguing for tighter restrictions on the patentability of process inventions. They claim that processes are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”
The board has ruled that a general purpose computer does not constitute “a particular machine” and, therefore, software processes are not patentable if they only run on a computer. The implications for this ruling are enormous and effect the entire software industry. The article explains how the Google PageRank patent will now be invalidated. Further confusing the situation, the board ruled, in a separate decision, that software process inventions distributed over multiple processors are patentable. How can this be?
First, KSR and now this. It must be an interesting time to be a patent attorney.
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