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The official position of the USPTO is that providing copies of non-patent literature to the USPTO for the purposes of patent prosecution is protected fair use provided that the applicant obtained the copies properly. [10] In 2012, two lawsuits were brought challenging this practice. [11]
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.
Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software.
Leading open-source figures and companies [10] have complained that software patents are overly broad and the USPTO should reject most of them. Bill Gates has said "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today".
2) If a work contains a mixture of original and copyright infringing material, but it is so intermingled as to be inseparable, then the copyright holder may take all profits from the work. Press Pub. Co. v. Monroe
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.
This is a list of software patents, which contains notable patents and patent applications involving computer programs (also known as a software patent). Software patents cover a wide range of topics and there is therefore important debate about whether such subject-matter should be excluded from patent protection. [ 1 ]