On 7/21/05, Arnoud Engelfriet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The example I gave earlier is > http://legal.european-patent-office.org/dg3/pdf/t950931eu1.pdf > which is European patent application > http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?IDX=EP0332770 > that was rejected for being a business method as such. And > if you read the decision, you'll see that there was no way they > were going to allow this application.
Agreed. As well they shouldn't have. > The corresponding US patent US4750121 was allowed without any such > problem. Claim 1 does not even recite "a computer", only several > "means" that perform certain steps to a master trust. The US examiner was clearly not on the ball, and/or not properly advised as to the significance of State Street. The PBS Partnership patent would, I suspect, be tossed out if litigated in the US, because there is not a reliable engineering relationship between the process being followed and the desired outcome. It's a collection of organizational tactics, which might represent an effective business approach, but it's not an invention. > So in my view, the fact that this kind of difference occurs > shows that in the US a lot more is patentable than in Europe. I think that cuts both ways. Look how long some of the MP3 patents, first issued in Germany, took to prosecute through the US system -- in a couple of cases, a decade or so after the German version had issued. Although I have not yet correlated against the originals, I would not be at all surprised to find that the allowed claims of the US versions are much narrower, judging from the continuations-in-part, abandoned applications, and all that. I have yet to see any evidence that persuades me that what is patentable in the US in some application area is a strict superset of what is patentable in Europe. Cheers, - Michael (IANAL, TINLA)
