US software patent litigation drops after Alice decision, says report
The number of some types of software patent lawsuits in the US has taken a nosedive since the 2014 decision in Alice v CLS Bank.
This is the finding of Patexia, an online patent research platform, which reported that software patent suits have declined heavily, although the fall was not equal across all software patent classification codes.
Patexia identified 14 different US classes that describe some sort of software-related system or process.
These classes covered more than 14% of the 22,791 unique patents involved in patent suits from 2010 through to the first half of 2016.
Classes such as 705—data processing for business practice and management—covered around 30% of all software patents over the time period, while artificial intelligence, in class 706, has rarely been the subject of a patent suit.
Post-Alice, two classes stood out as being most affected: 705, mentioned above, and 707, which covers data processing for database and file management or data structures. In 2012, class 707 patents were involved in 184 suits, while in 2013 the class was involved in 185. However, in 2014, this number dropped to 123and continued to fall in 2015, when the class was involved in 92 cases.
The Alice decision was madwae on June 19, 2014, with the US Supreme Court holding that claims directed to an electronic escrow service for facilitating financial transactions were ineligible for patent protection because the claims were directed to an abstract idea.
However, the Alice decision didn’t provide a clear test for what should be an abstract idea.
“Our analysis of patent suits from 2010 shows that while the number of software patents involved in patent suits were relatively constant from 2010 to 2012, they rapidly declined post Alice in 2014 and 2015,” said Pedram Sameni, CEO of Patexia.
He added: “This decline was exacerbated for certain US patent classes such as 705 and 707 … We believe this decline is mainly due to the Alice decision as well as the availability of new methods to challenge patent validities through the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.”
WIPR has published expert comment on the Alice decision, they can be viewed below:
A blake future for Alice in Europe
