Since the June 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Alice Corporation Pty Ltd. v. CLS Bank
Int'l, the vast majority of district court
decisions, Federal Circuit decisions, and Patent Trial and Appeals
Board (PTAB) decisions that considered the issue have overturned
software and business method patents under the new
patent-eligibility standard of Alice. In the first quarter of
2015 alone, when considering a motion to dismiss or a motion
for judgment on the pleadings on the basis of patent-eligibility
under §101, U.S. district courts have granted the motions
and ruled the patents to be invalid over 66% of the
time.
In November 2014, I published a
post that summarized court and PTAB decisions that bucked this
trend and found software to be patent-eligible. Since then,
a small but growing number of cases refused to overturn patents
that involved software, and the USPTO issued an
Interim Guidance document describing actual and hypothetical
claims that could survive
