The Alice v CLS Bank Supreme Court case has generated a lot of heat and light recently with over 50 amicus briefs filed, countless blog posts, and even a slew of newspaper articles on the subject. With commentary from the pro-software patents and anti-software patents sides of the fence, the case was billed as either merely an opportunity to validate recent cases on the issue of patentable subject matter and section 101 (Bilski, Mayo & Myriad) or the End of Days Software Patents. Yesterday saw the oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. Would this provide an indication of how the case would go? (Ed. At the heart of the case is whether processes long in practice–such as hedging–are essentially changed, when handled via computer-enabled methods, into something new and protectible by patent.)
With its repeated references to King Tut (four) and abacuses (eight) you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the Justices were playing some kind of an Egyptian Bingo game at our expense. (Ed. The references were meant to drive home the longevity of some common practices that obviously predate Microsoft, et al.) Despite the best efforts of Alice’s counsel to make the case for patent eligibility of the Alice patents, the line of questioning from the Justices suggested that the court was moving towards a rather focussed decision that would parallel the results of other cases and find that the patents in question merely related to the use of computers to facilitate an abstract idea. Whatever the thinking of the court, however, we won’t have long to wait with a decision expected in June. // Mark Richardson