Monthly Archives - August 2014

On June 19, 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, that basic business methods could not be patented, even if computers are used to apply them. An Australian company, Alice Corporation, owned the patents at issue. The case questioned the patent eligibility of Alice Corp.’s claims to a computerized method, a computer-readable medium containing computer instructions, and a computer system that implements those instructions. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court and determined that “merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [the] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.”

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