Re: [Patents] The New Yorker on Business Method Patents

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

>What can be said is that "State Street" fuelled a business method hype by
>making it unambiguously clear that such patents are welcome.

What "State Street" made clear was that the court found the phrase
'business method' too ill-defined to be used as a criteria for
rejecting a patent application.  A quote from one of the footnotes
best captures this:

    [The business method exception] is . . . an unwarranted encumbrance
    to the definition of statutory subject matter in section 101, that
    [should] be discarded as error-prone, redundant, and obsolete. It
    merits retirement from the glossary of section 101. . . . All of the
    "doing business" cases could have been decided using the clearer
    concepts of Title 35. Patentability does not turn on whether the
    claimed method does "business" instead of something else, but on
    whether the method, viewed as a whole, meets the requirements of
    patentability as set forth in Sections 102, 103, and 112 of the
    Patent Act.

Sections 102, 103 and 112 being the tests for novelty, inventive step and
enablement.

Hopefully someday a court in Europe will rule that European use of
'technical effect' is just error-prone, redundant and obsolete,
especially given that no one in Europe seems very interested in 
more clearly identifying 'technical', for example, using one common
dictionary definition, 'applied science'.

Greg Aharonian