In a brief submitted to a US Court of Appeals, various major internet and IT companies have stated that the combination of an abstract idea and a computer should not be eligible for patent protection. “Many computer-related patent claims just describe an abstract idea at a high level of generality and say to perform it on a computer or over the internet”, said the briefthat was submitted by companies such as Google and Facebook on Friday. Other signatories include Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace, Red Hat and Zynga.
The companies argued that such bare-bones claims grant exclusive rights over the abstract idea itself with no limit on how the idea is implemented, and that granting patent protection for such claims would impair, not promote, innovation. In their 30-page brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the signatories explain that this often grants exclusive rights to people who haven’t themselves contributed significantly to a development, punishing those who later create innovation and cannot market the concrete applications of these abstract ideas unless they pay royalties…Read more at The H Open
