What CLS Bank Taketh, Copyright May Giveth Back

Courts, commentators and clients will be struggling for some time to assess the impact on software patents of Thursday's Supreme Court decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. Interpreted one way, the decision kills patents directed at computer-implemented business methods. Interpreted another way, it's business as usual for patentees. The Supreme Court found that using a computer to implement an abstract idea was not sufficiently inventive to justify patent protection. It is not clear, however, whether the decision has much reach beyond the facts of the CLS Bank case itself. Part of the problem is how miserable the patents at issue really were. The patentee's inspiration was to employ a third party to collect financial information on the parties to a transaction in order to verify that they had sufficient funds to close a deal. This is otherwise known as employing an escrow agent or clearing house, and it is a method of mitigating risk in transactions that appears to be