Business Method Patents: A General Overview on the Patentability in Comparative Jurisdictions: US, UK and India

Abstract

With the increase in the complexity of trade and commerce, there has been a huge indulgence of the entrepreneur’s mind in creating newer and valuable intellectual properties to avoid the normal competition prevailing in the market. This has rather led to the birth of vivid varieties of intellectual works. This can be said only in the literal sense as to classify them as intellectual property, which indeed is a legal term, one has to see whether that particular work generated out of the intellectual labor is covered under the aegis of the law.Business Method Patents are per se not new to the patent law as the earliest business method patents granted goes back to the 18th Century1 yet they have not been recognized in many jurisdictions to be patent eligible. The reasons are manifold for instance a business method may not qualify either for either of the test of patentability on the basis of patentable subject matter (new invention/ new discovery/ new use), novelty, inventive step or non-obviousness and industrial applicability or utility.However, the reality is that business method patents can be granted depending upon the claims represented in the application and the way in which the invention is projected. Moreover, today most of the business method patent applications are related to computers and are covered under computer-implemented inventions; the general problem is to classify them and to understand them to be of what category of patent- a process or a machine?There are other problems also associated with business method patents and that is of economic nature. It is a well recognized practice that generally methods of doing businesses are not inventions per se and therefore, cannot be patented but the involvement of external knowledge i.e. the combination of two or more disciplines that leads to the applicability of the method may make it unique and unprecedented; similarly involvement of technology would also result into the same.