In re Alappat ruling by US CAFC on 29 July 1994
In re Alappat, 33 F.3d 1526, 1543 is a 1994 of the USA's Federal Circuit court.
Alappat applied for a patent on a particular method used in a particular kind of electronic instrument. The patent examiner rejected the application, the USPTO's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) then found in favour of the application and the case then went to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, where it is known as In re Alappat. The Federal Court reversed the decision of the BPAI, denying the patent.
(Alappat is often misspelt Allapat or alapatt)
Excerpts
As cited by SAP in their amicus brief for the 2008 in re Bilski case:
[i]t is estimated that 85-90% of the world's technology is disclosed only in patent documents.
(Newman, J., concurring)
Of course, using this quote when discussing software is disingenuous given the massive, complete, and freely reusable information disclosed by free software such as GNU/Linux, and given that many authorities have said of software patents that the disclosure is useless.
Regarding limitations on the patentability of mathematical subject matter:
[The Court] never intended to create an overly broad, fourth category of [mathematical] subject matter excluded from 101. Rather, at the core of the Court's analysis . . . lies an attempt by the Court to explain a rather straightforward concept, namely, that certain types of mathematical subject matter, standing alone, represent nothing more than abstract ideas until reduced to some type of practical application, and thus that subject matter is not, in and of itself, entitled to patent protection.
Related pages on ESP Wiki
- Case law in the USA
- Software Patents: A Time for Change, recordings of a conference where a few presentations discussed Alappat
External links
- In re Alapatt: on the IT Law Wiki.
- In re Alapatt: at Digital Law Online
- History of Software Patents III: In re Alappat
