Software patent

Permission, where granted, is typically in the form of a license which conditions are set by the patent owner: it may be free or in return for a royalty payment or lump sum fee.

On 21 May 1962, a British patent application entitled "A Computer Arranged for the Automatic Solution of Linear Programming Problems" was filed.

[5] The High Court of Australia has refrained from ruling on the precise definition of manner of manufacture stating that any such attempt is bound to fail for the policy reason of encouraging national development in fields that may be unpredictable.

[7] In another unanimous decision by the Full Federal Court of Australia, an invention for methods of storing and retrieving Chinese characters to perform word processing was held to be an artificially created state of affairs and consequently within the concept of a manner of manufacture.

[9] The subject matter of the invention was held to be an abstract idea and not a manner of manufacture within the meaning of the term in the Patents Act.

Recently, the design idea of the software itself has been allowed to apply for patent separately, instead of requiring to be combined with hardware.

[12] When the EPO examines a patent application with questionable subject matter eligibility, their approach is to simply[dubious – discuss] disregard any ineligible portions or aspects and evaluate the rest.

This 2017 guidelines provides clarity on patentability of software invention in India, i.e., the claimed computer-related invention needs to be ascertained whether it is of a technical nature involving technical advancement as compared to the existing knowledge or having economic significance or both, and is not subject to exclusion under Section 3 of the Patents Act.

Innovation in the field of artificial intelligence, blockchain technologies and other digital products would be based on computer programs, however the same would not become nonpatentable inventions – simply for that reason.

Thus, the effect that such programs produce including in digital and electronic products is crucial in determining the test of patentability.Patent applications in these fields would have to be examined to see if they result in a “technical contribution”, it added.

To qualify as an invention, however, there must be "a creation of technical ideas utilizing a law of nature"[21] although this requirement is typically met by "concretely realising the information processing performed by the software by using hardware resources".

[22] Software-related inventions may be considered obvious if they involve the application of an operation known in other fields, the addition of a commonly known means or replacement by equivalent, the implementation in software of functions which were previously performed by hardware, or the systematisation of known human transactions.

[27] In the Philippines, "schemes, rules and methods of performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers" are non-patentable inventions under Sec.

For example, the business method prevention has high tendency to hinder the growth in innovations especially for the infant software companies.

Following several landmark decisions by this court, by the early 1990s the patentability of software was well established, and in 1996 the USPTO issued Final Computer Related Examination Guidelines stating that "A practical application of a computer-related invention is statutory subject matter.

Critics of the Federal Circuit believe that the non-obviousness standard is partly responsible for the large increase in patents for software and business methods.

An issue with software patent intellectual property rights is typically revolved around deciding whether the company or inventor owns it.

14 Year 2001, Article 1 of Patent Law in Indonesia,[47] application is considered as an invention if the activity is created to solve a particular conflict or problem in the technology sector.

Therefore, in accordance to the regulations under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, a software will have a regional protection among the participating entities of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

[46] This update is geared to encourage innovation and growth by augmenting the number of patents within the public and private sector in Indonesia.

[53] This is based on Justice William Rehnquist's ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Diamond v. Diehr that stated that "... insignificant postsolution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process.

"[54] By this rule, one would consider software loaded onto a stock PC to be an abstract algorithm with obvious postsolution activity, while a new circuit design implementing the logic would likely be a nonobvious physical device.

There are a number of high-profile examples where the patenting of a data exchange standards forced another programming group to introduce an alternative format.

This allows the creator to prevent another entity from copying the program and there is generally no need to register code in order for it to be copyrighted.

Such actions have provoked only minor reaction from the free and open source software communities for reasons such as fear of the patent holder changing their mind or the license terms being so narrow as to have little use.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has reached similar agreements with Dell and Samsung,[87] due to alleged patent infringements of the Linux operating system.

[88] In the late 1990s, Unisys claimed to have granted royalty free licenses to hundreds of not-for-profit organizations that used the patented LZW compression method and, by extension, the GIF image format.

Microsoft, for example, has agreements with IBM, Sun (now Oracle), SAP, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Cisco, Autodesk,[91] and recently Novell.

They collectively generate about $1.4 billion per year through licensing the inventions they develop to both established and start up companies in all fields of technology, including software.

Some of these patent holders, such as Intellectual Ventures, are privately held companies financed by large corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google, etc.