A Study on the cases of software patent litigation and the development of the software patent regime

• Main Authors: Chih-Husn Hung, 洪志勳
• Other Authors: Shang-Jyh Liu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/56264433849578865743

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 科技法律研究所 === 95 === Under the government policy in Taiwan, the structure upgrade of information industry is moving from “manufacture base” to “high value service base”. The “computer software” will be the main force to drive the industrial structure upgrade, and then the value of the software patent will be of more importance. In the global market, the number of the software patent grows rapidly during the recent years. Take the U.S. for example. There are 40,000 software patents in 2006 and the rate of software patent is 20% of the issued patents in 2006. However, the growth of software patent gives rise to many disputes, such as “the bad quality of software patent,” “floody patent lititgation,” and “patent troll.” Is software patent for innovation or for litigation? Consequently, it is the motive of this thesis to study this issue. This thesis does a comparative study on the software patent elements, software patent examination, and software patent cases among the U.S., the EP, the Japan, and Tawian. With the comparative study, this thesis constructs the software patent regime and then uses the patent analysis, litigation data analysis and case study to do the empirical study on the software patent problems. Based on results of the software patent regime and the empirical study, this thesis construes a hypothetic software patent regime, which is used to do the empirical study on the software patent regime. Taiwan’s software patent regime follows the U.S.’s software patent case law. By the hypothetic software patent regime, this thesis finds that the U.S. software patent regime tends to examine strictly, and Taiwan also faces amendment of software patent examination guideline under the pressure. Finally, this thesis finds Taiwan’s software patent regime might adopt the EP software patent regime, because the influence of the amendment of the software patent examination guideline will not cause sharp effect for information industry in Taiwan.