Personal Injury Law

Inventors ClaimPatent Rules Are Out of Date

By Edward Bills

A recent case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit points up the difficulty of making such judgments in the age of the Internet.

Two inventors from Pittsburgh developed a computerized method for using weather data to predict commodities prices and energy costs. But their efforts to patent the formula were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a decision upheld by the federal appeals court.

The inventors and their intellectual property lawyers argue that novel business concepts deserve patent protection as much as physical machines that transform industries.

They have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the appeals court ruling. They say that without the ability to profit from such inventions, the biotech and information services companies won’t be willing to invest in research and development of other breakthroughs.

The patent office’s and court’s rejections of the inventor’s business method patent claim follows years of rather liberal interpretations by patent examiners as to what qualified as an invention. And the new standard imposed, that the invention must involve a machine or a physical transformation, threatens to put the brakes on the busiest area of patent application and analysis.

Full post as published by Bodily Injury Blog on February 24, 2009 (boomark / email).