UK High Court Allows Software Patents

By Kristopher A. Nelson
in January 2008

200 words / 1 min.
Tweet Share Techdirt - UK High Court Follows Bad US Decision To Allow Software Patents: It looks like the UK is about to make the same dangerous mistake that US courts made a while back. A decision there has now stated that the Patent Office shouldn’t automatically reject patent apps on software. Although I am in general […]

Please note that this post is from 2008. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

Techdirt – UK High Court Follows Bad US Decision To Allow Software Patents:

It looks like the UK is about to make the same dangerous mistake that US courts made a while back. A decision there has now stated that the Patent Office shouldn’t automatically reject patent apps on software.

Although I am in general agreement with Techdirt on this one, I suspect there might be an unexplored, middle ground on this, but I haven’t quite been able to conceptualize it yet. (Perhaps I never will.) 

Perhaps it is simply that I believe that if properly applied by a patent office a by courts, software patents aren’t necessarily bad—but then again, I haven’t seem them very well applied so far in the U.S. Generally courts (and the PTO) don’t really seem to understand the underlying technology very well, making for poorly reasoned decisions (on a technical level). 
Plus, 20 or so years of patent protection seems way too long for the quick-moving world of software. (That may be my biggest issue.) I’m never that fond of random differences in the law for different kinds of IP, for example, but maybe that’s what’s needed here.