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not to be picky…. but,
Not to be picky or anything, but in response to Ars Technica:
- It was the Federal Circuit in 1998 (cert. denied by Supreme Court) that held in favor of the patenting of business methods.
- It was the Supreme Court in 1981 that ordered the PTO to allow software to be patented.
- It was not the US Patent Office’s unilateral decision to allow patenting of software.
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Posted by Douglas Sorocco, December 2, 2004 at 6:07 pm
Permalink: not to be picky…. but,
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…best Law Blog 2005
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Our offices are located at:
1000 The Tower
1601 NW Expressway, Suite 1000
Oklahoma City, OK 73107
405-607-8600
1000 Farragut Square
1025 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-327-5495
Diamond v Diehr is pretty ambiguous. It says that a physical manifestation of a mathematical algorithm is patentable, but the question of whether a trivial and obvious physical manifestation is sufficient really wasn’t answered—there’s a long distance between a rubber-curing machine and a general-purpose computer in many minds. It was up to the USPTO to decide whether the trivial and obvious physical application of software to a general-purpose computer counted as valid.Diamond v Diehr was so ambiguous on this question that the CAFC convened a panel explicitly to answer this question (In re Alappat). if the Supreme Court had `ordered the USPTO to allow software patents’, then In re Alappat would have been a one-page ruling. Instead, they had to pull out all the legal stops to show that a PC and a rubber-curing machine are identical under the law.