US Supreme Court to examine Business Method patents

As Business Week notes, the U.S. Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would take up a major issue in intellectual-property law: whether patents should be granted for what are known as business methods. Many financial, accounting, and e-commerce firms have rushed to obtain patent protection for such things as ways to structure financial products, manage organizations, or transact business on the Internet. As they note, businesses are split on this (but somewhat predictably):

IBM, which has obtained a slew of business-method patents, filed an amicus brief in what is known as the Bilski case, stating that the company is now opposed to them. IBM maintains that the patents are not needed to promote innovation; businesses would come up with the products even without patent protection. "You're creating a new 20-year monopoly for no good reason," IBM's top in-house patent attorney, David Kappos, told BusinessWeek last year.

Accenture, the big consulting and technology services firm, vigorously supports business-method patents. "Why shouldn't new techniques for managing organizations be entitled to patent protection?" asks Wayne Sobon, Accenture's intellectual-property director, in an interview. "It's exactly like any other engineering field," he says. "Instead of applying science to control electrons, [consultants] apply science and engineering principles to improve how people work better together."

Lets be clear here - this whole area is a scam, requiring little skill and investment in R&D. I can write down a business method on an envelope and patent it - the amount of work I have to do is minimal. With the help of my colleague Paul Lancefield's patent search engine I can find out who else is in the space and dodge around them. Except that as a small company, its expensive for us - c $10k + to file, and very costly to enforce. But large players like Accenture can patent away like there is no tomorrow, so within a short while I potentially can't run a business without having to but someone's methodology for running it.

The original idea of patenting was to protect innovation so a company could fund the huge capital costs in developing the priduct. In business model cases its a licence to troll.

In other words, it stifles, not helps, innovation.

The whole business method patent scam started in 1998 when some retain dotcoms bamboozled the Patents Office, but we noted last year that the reversal started after the Bliski case was overturned (a Hedge fund tried to patent a business practice. As we noted at the time, its an encouraging trend towards ratioanlity in patents.

Now all they have to do is sort out prior art definitions and trolling...........