China May Become More Liberal Towards Business Method And Software Related Patents

On 27 October 2016, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) published, for comments by the public, proposed draft revisions to its current Examination Guidelines for examining software-related inventions. In the draft revised Guidelines SIPO goes one step further, as, in addition to granting patents for software-related inventions that solve a technical problem, is willing to allow patents for data carriers, and, in some cases, even for business methods.

Over recent decades and particularly since the turn of the Millennium, China has made highly significant advances in its IP protection regime. In the field of computer-implemented inventions, however, like many other patent examining authorities, SIPO held the position that for an invention to be patentable, it had to solve a technical problem¹. This stance, while classifying some categories of software-related inventions as patent eligible, still ruled out the obtaining of patents on many other types