App stores: a digital no man’s land or innovation’s bane?

Abstract

If one accepts that patents are the most desirable form of IP protection and that Web-based technologies are presently the most commercially lucrative, then a smart inventor would focus today on obtaining a Web-oriented patent. 1 Surprisingly, very little attention is being paid in the EU to this area of law. Consequently, the patent system is almost entirely ignored by the creators of the world’s most innovative digital products. As a direct result of the uncertainty surrounding the grant/refusal of a software patent, two approaches are emerging in e-commerce: This article will focus solely on the latter approach, its advantages and disadvantages, before concluding that e-commerce is being unnecessarily held back by confusion in the sector regarding software patent law. However, first, some comment is necessary on the development and the status quo of e-commerce. As soon as the Internet became accessible and used worldwide, entrepreneurs raced to get their wares online, and good programmers became rock stars practically overnight. Presiding over this dot.com explosion was Google’s system of ranking websites. The remainder of the last millennium and the early noughties saw a hardware scuffle (culminating in smartphone technologies) and an explosion in social media.