I’m very excited that Doug Lichtman, a sharp law professor at UCLA, has decided to take up podcasting. His podcast, Intellectual Property Colloquium, features monthly, in-depth discussions of copyright and patent law. The first installment (mp3) featured a lively discussion between Lichtman and EFF’s inimitable Fred von Lohmann about the Cablevision decision and its implications for copyright law. November’s episode focused on In Re Bilski, the widely-discussed decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit limiting patents on abstract concepts like software and business methods. The podcast featured two law professors, John Duffy (who argued the Bilski case before the Federal Circuit) and Rob Merges.
As I noted at the time it was decided, people care about Bilski largely because of what it says about legality of software patents. Software patents are intensely controversial, with many geeks arguing that the software industry would be better off without them. What I found striking about the conversation was that both guests (and perhaps the host, although he didn’t tip his hand as much) took it as self-evident that there needed to be patents on software and business methods. As one of the guests (I couldn’t tell if it was Merges and Duffy, but they seemed to largely agree) said around minute 47:
The easiest criticism of the [Bilski] opinion is that it invites this kind of somewhat pointless metaphysical investigation. What you say is “look, I’ve got an invention, I wrote some code, I’d like to a patent for that.” Why do we have to play this kind of sophomoric philosophical game of “well, what changes in the real world when my code runs?” The [Supreme Court] case law arose fairly early in the information technology revolution. We’re kind of stuck with this artifactual, residual overhang of physicality. It’s just the price we have to pay to get a software patent these days. Someday maybe it will drop away or wither away, but that’s where we find ourselves now.
On this view, the Supreme Court’s historical hostility toward patents on software is merely an historical accident—a “residual overhang” that we’d do well to get beyond. Guided by a strong policy preference for the patentability of software and business methods, Duffy and Merges seem to feel that the Federal Circuit should give little weight to Supreme Court decisions that they regard as out of touch with the modern realities of the software industry. After all, this is “just the price we have to pay to get a software patent these days.”
I don’t agree with this perspective. I’ve long sympathized with software patent critics such as Ben Klemens who argue that the Supreme Court’s precedents place clear limits on the patenting of software. But I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the Supreme Court’s classic decisions and talk to some patent scholars to see if I can understand why there are such divergent opinions about the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. The result is a new feature article for Ars Technica, where I review the Supreme Court’s classic trilogy of software patent cases and ponder how those cases should be applied to the modern world.
Like most Supreme Court decisions, these three opinions are not the clearest in the world. The justices, like most of the legal profession, seem slightly confused about the relationships among mathematical algorithms, software, and computer programs. It’s certainly possible to find phrases in these cases that support either side of the software patent debate. However, a clear theme emerges from all three cases: mathematics is ineligible for patent protection, and software algorithms are mathematics. The high court struggled with what to do in cases where software is one part of an otherwise-patentable machine. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of the “pure” software patents that have generated so much controversy in recent years cannot be reconciled with the Supreme Court’s precedents. For example, it’s hard to read those precedents in a way that would allow Amazon’s famous “one-click” patent.
I also argue that this result is a good one from a public policy perspective. Software has several important properties that make it fundamentally different than the other categories of now-patentable subject matter. As Klemens points out, almost every significant firm has an IT department that creates software. That means that every significant firm is a potential target for software patent lawsuits. This is a very different situation than, say, pharmaceutical patents which only affect a tiny fraction of the American economy. Second, software is already eligible for copyright protection, rendering software patents largely redundant. Most important, we now have 15 years of practical experience with software patents, and the empirical results have not been encouraging. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the explosion of patent litigation over the last fifteen years has been concentrated in the software industry.
As the Federal Circuit struggles to craft new rules for patent-eligible software patents, it should take a close look at the far more restrictive rules for patent eligibility that were applied in the 1970s and early 1980s.
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