In the last few years, the debate with regard to software patents has really caught fire. At the basic level, defining the nitty gritties of software patents is rather hard and you may be hard pressed to find a definition of software patents in traditional books of intellectual property laws. Software installed on a physical computer system or any computer readable media which is the result of any innovative process on machine is qualified as patentable.
Any applicant who wants to obtain a software patent has to file a patent application. Such application must claim the software tool or package employs and/or performs a specific function or process and can be transferred through a machine readable media.
Software patents do not have any long history as the concept of software patents or the software itself is fairly a new thing. In United States, the first software patent was granted in 1981, the relevant legal authority being cited as Diamond v. Diehr. The issue involved a system of thermal treatment of rubber. The system was computer controlled with a specialized software tool being used to compute the optimum duration for the thermal treatment process.
The secondary legal authority is cited as State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group. In this case a software system empowered business method was granted a patent. This judgment was deli-vered in the year 1998 and played a key role in redefining software patents. As told earlier, software patents have been and are being debated across the globe. The first question any software developer or company, who plans to patent a piece of software asks is "Can software be patented?". The simple answer is that it depends on where you are. The United States patent office currently grants software patents. The European Union does not grant software patents. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in software patent applications and grants in the United States.
Any classification of software patents is practically nonexistent in the present day legal structure. Most of the recent software patents have been based on the innovation in business process criteria yet even now as many as 1400 software patents are based mainly upon computational algorithms.
Big companies in the computing industry like IBM, AT&T, Siemens, HP and Microsoft have an exten-sive range of software patents. IBM alone holds nearly 31,995 software patents in United States. Hewlett Packard holds in excess of 20,000 software patents across the globe. Microsoft has been granted above 5000 US software patents. Communication giant Siemens owns or has applied for more than 10,000 US software patents.
As of now, many patent holders have developed cross licensing agreements which allow them to ben-efit from each other's innovations but the final solution of patent debates remains elusive.
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