A Comparative Study of Business Method Patents

• Main Authors: Shih-Nung Chou, 周士農
• Other Authors: 余啟民
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/74519992328969570650

碩士 === 東吳大學 === 法律學系 === 103 === As computer and internet technologies are developed, more and more business models applying them are invented. However, not all of the models can be granted patents by a patent office. Under the US, EPO, CN and TW patent practices, pure business methods as such would not be granted patents because of the abstract concept. If the business methods further have other “technical characters” or “meaningful limitations”, these methods may have higher patentabilities based on their patent eligibility as a whole. Currently, the main difference between each of countries on a patent eligibility test is the determination of the technical characters or the meaningful limitations, wherin the criteria thereof in EPO are much lower than those in US, CN and TW. After the decision of raising the patent eligibility criteria to the Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank case by the U.S. Surpreme Court, an amount of new lawsuits decreases markedly, and business method patent applications are not easily granted. However, the present research considers that the trends to raise the patent eligibility criteria may not deviate from the legislative purposes of Patent Acts provided that the balance between the private benefits and the public benefits is not affected unduely. Besides, the attitudes of international or local E-commercial companies or Chinese bankers to the patent deployment are quite different, but the present research proposes that the desired companies or bankers still need to carry out the deployment of the high quality patent portfolio concerning business method inventions. This may provide many benefits, for example, this patent portofolio may be used as a weapon in patent litigations or licensing negotiations. For the lower quality inventions, the present research proposes that those probably ungranted inventions may be protected by other routes such as the so-called “Trade Secrets Protection”. This may avoid the problems that an inventor or an applicant cannot obtain any benefits but the invetions thereof have been disclosed to the public; and that many competitors learned from the disclosures may be created in the market.