Case law

Case law is only really of interest to us if it's based on "subject matter".

Case law on subject matter

Case law is important if the judges decide based on "subject matter" - what types of ideas can or cannot be patented.

There are many grounds on which a court can rule a patent to be invalid. A court might say the patent wasn't original enough, or wasn't sufficiently innovative. These court rulings are not very interesting for our goal of excluding software from patentability. An example is the ruling in Germany which invalidated Microsoft's Fat32 patent.