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Judge Plager: Regrets "Unintended Consequences" of State Street

By Peter Zura

Recently, CAFC Senior Judge Jay Plager spoke at a symposium at George Mason University, where he called for a "rethinking" of several aspects of patent law by returning to its origins in property law.

According to BNA,

[Plager] called for a renewed focus on setting recognizable patent ownership boundaries and on strengthening the notice function that patents are intended to serve. Such a reevaluation might require a reassessment of whether software and business methods are patentable subject matter, Plager said. It might lead to limiting a patent?s scope to what was known at the time of the application filing, and to an abandonment the doctrine of equivalents as a basis for patent infringement liability.

Also,

Plager said he regretted the unintended consequences of the decisions in State Street Bank and AT&T. Those rulings led to a flood of applications for software and business method patents, he noted. If we ?rethink the breadth of patentable subject matter,? he said, we should ask whether these categories should be excluded from patent protection.

See post from Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property blog here.

Full post as published by Two-Seventy-One Patent Blog on July 29, 2008 (boomark / email).