Christian Science Monitor: The war over patents on the Web: Who owns an idea?

“Until recently, case law put business methods outside the realm
of machines, man-made products, compositions of matter, and
processing methods – the four general areas of inventions
patentable under US code. The question is one of semantics: Is a
business method an invention and patentable, or is it an idea and
therefore unpatentable?”

“A 1998 case in the US Court of Appeals, State Street Bank
& Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, flatly concluded that
there were no statutory grounds for opposing business-method
patents. Coupled with the rise of e-commerce, this unleashed a
flurry of applications. In 1997, the office granted 39 patents
for business methods on the Internet. In 1999, there were 301 such
grants.”

“To qualify for a patent, an invention must be new, useful, and
nonobvious. Programmers, especially, say that maverick
entrepreneurs and bullish company leaders are morphing old
practices onto the Net and peddling them as novel. “Transforming
data around in a way people did before, except doing it on the
Internet, is always obvious,” says Richard Stallman, a founder of
the GNU/Linux free operating system.”

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