Strong Opinions On Alice’s Fifth Anniversary

The 2014 Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International held that claims drawn to an abstract idea were not eligible for patent protection merely because they were implemented on a computer. On the fifth anniversary of the ruling IP Watchdog sought the responses of IP stakeholders to the following statement: “Alice has dramatically and negatively impacted my industry/practice over the last five years.” Here is a sample of responses: Scott Elmer, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, strongly agreed, arguing that a great strength of U.S. patent law is that the basic rules of patentability can be applied equally to inventions of all types, but with Alice the Supreme Court created an ill-defined set of exceptions. Steve Kunin, Maier & Maier, strongly agreed as well, saying the main problem has been that it has taken too long for the Federal Circuit and the USPTO to issue progressive and meaningful guidance on how to apply the Alice two-part test for patent subject matter eligibility. Mark A. Lemley, Stanford Law School/Durie Tangri LLP/ Lex Machina Inc strongly disagrees. “Alice has weeded out the worst of the nuisance-value patent troll suits while allowing most real patent litigation to continue apace.  Outside the medical diagnostics field, the people who suffered from Alice are mostly those who were gaming the system,” he says,