A district court recently held that a software decompiler patent
was not invalid for lack of patentable subject matter. The decision
comes less than four months after the Supreme Court's Alice
v. CLS Bank decision that shifted the rules for software
patents and opened the doors to a flood of challenges in front of
the PTAB. The court found the invention not invalid despite the
parties agreeing that the invention could be performed manually or
by a human mind, which had previously doomed software patents.
The software at issue was a decompiler program. For background,
source code is not readable by a computer, and must be converted
into an intermediary file, which is then assembled into a binary
code readable by the computer. Binary code is not readable by
humans, so some programs can operate in reverse and
"decompile" the binary code into a human-readable
representation. These are called decompiler programs.
