Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, the host of the Bold Today Show where you, the inventor, entrepreneur, or business owner, get your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. Happy Monday, everybody! I’m sure you’re all excited. Thank you for joining me here on the Bold Today Show this week. What are we talking about? Software and how software fits into the patent world. There’s been a lot of negative press about patents and software and how they just aren’t compatible. Well, I’m here to tell you this week some very fun news about the Federal Circuit, and now the Supreme Court has been put on the spot and actually has recently said they are allowed patent eligibility. So, we’re going to explore how each of these different patents, as they progress through the Patent Office, has been allowed into the issued, granted group of patents out there.
This first date, we’re going to take a step back and first get a feel for okay, what are we talking about? How does software fit within the statutory rules within 35 USC 101? There are four main types of patents you can get that are called utility patents. As we’re talking about machines, manufacturers, compositions of matter, and processes. When software is written down in terms of claims, they are, for the most part, going to be claimed as processes. These are steps, methods, approaches of manipulating tools, software data, electrons, even gadgets and devices in specific ways through computerized means. It’s going to be an articulation of a process. The other way is software could come about is through a machine right, a reaction device, and you’re using a computer to move or to change atoms. Right, to change the world, whether it be temperature, electrons moving, the actual volume or capacity, the pressure, something in real life is changing through a machine. And this is all kind of coming about recently with this Internet of Things (IoT) acronym that’s been floating around.
So either through processes or machines, software patents are eligible under 35 USC Section 101. So that’s the lay of the land. I’ve given you kind of the basis of the law on this first day. Tomorrow, we’re going to jump into the heart of it, talk about one of the most recent decisions a few years ago that set the course for patents, and that is CLS versus Alice. So, there’s the cliffhanger for you. We’ll talk tomorrow. If you’ve got questions about this, maybe you’ve got a software patent idea and you want to get it looked at by an attorney, feel free to give us a call.