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Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. [1] The opponents to software patents have gained more visibility with fewer resources through the years than their pro-patent opponents. [2] Arguments and critiques have been focused mostly on the economic consequences of software patents.
Neither software nor computer programs are explicitly mentioned in statutory United States patent law.Patent law has changed to address new technologies, and decisions of the United States Supreme Court and United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) beginning in the latter part of the 20th century have sought to clarify the boundary between patent-eligible and patent ...
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, library, user interface, or algorithm.The validity of these patents can be difficult to evaluate, as software is often at once a product of engineering, something typically eligible for patents, and an abstract concept, which is typically not.
Contemporary arguments have focused on ways that patents can slow innovation by: blocking researchers' and companies' access to basic, enabling technology, and particularly following the explosion of patent filings in the 1990s, through the creation of "patent thickets"; wasting productive time and resources fending off enforcement of low-quality patents that should not have existed ...
The "patentability" of inventions (defining the types things that qualify for patent protection) is defined under Sections 100–105. Most notably, section 101 [9] sets out "subject matter" that can be patented; section 102 [10] defines "novelty" and "statutory bars" to patent protection; section 103 [11] requires that an invention to be "non ...
Probably the most successful was the anti-software-patent campaign in Europe that resulted in the rejection by the European Parliament of the Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions which, the free software community argues, would have made software patents enforceable in the European Union.
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The patent (option) will have value to the buyer (owner) only to the extent that the expected price in the future exceeds the opportunity cost of earning just as much in a risk-less alternative. Thus patent rights can be thought of as corresponding to a call option and may be valued accordingly.