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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.
A patent applicant may include a copyright notice or mask work notice, but only if it also includes the following authorization, expressly permitting the reproduction of the patent: [9] A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to (copyright or mask work) protection.
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".
This argument was used by some adversaries [5] of software patents to contend that software patents would not be allowed by the TRIPS agreement. [6] TRIPS textbooks see no conflict, for instance Correa & Yusuf [7] notes that software patents complement copyright because copyright does not protect underlying ideas.
Although lawsuits for declaratory judgement are prohibited in the US in general, they are allowed in cases of potential patent infringement. [13] [14] A research exemption and fair use is allowed for using patented product or process for research and educational purposes, albeit their scopes have seen reductions in recent years. [15]
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.
On review in 2014 the Supreme Court reduced the patent-eligibility of software patents or patents on software for business methods, excluding abstract ideas from the list of eligible subject matters. After much confusion within the patent examiners and patent practitioners, the USPTO prepared a list of examples of software patent claims that ...