Google, Facebook and Zynga ask courts to reject claims on abstract ideas patents

The fact that you take an abstract idea and say that you will use it "on a computer" or "via the Internet" does not mean that you deserve a patent - says an expert opinion drawn up on Friday by Google, Facebook and six other technology companies. They ask the courts to reject claims based on vague patents on ideas instead of specific implementations, since such patents lead to higher prices and slower technical progress.

Expert opinions allow parties not directly involved in the case to provide information that will help the court to make a decision. The document, also signed by Zynga, Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace and Red Hat, provides information for the US Court of Appeals in the CLS v. Alice case. CLS states that Alice’s patents on vague ideas of financial redistribution using computers should not be recognized as legitimate. However, the court of first instance initially decided that Alice patents were legal and could be used in a case against CLS.

The companies that signed the conclusion are trying to convince the court that “This issue is of critical importance in the context of high technologies”, and there is a big risk that if such cases are resolved in the future, then the entire industry will receive a heavy blow. The main part of the document states:
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A large number of patents related to computer technology, describe only an abstract idea in a very general sense, and offer to use it with the help of computers or the Internet. These meager patents, however, give an exclusive right to the idea itself, without restrictions on how it will be implemented. If such patents are recognized as legitimate, they will slow down, and not speed up, innovations. This will happen due to the fact that exclusive rights will be transferred to those who have not actually made any innovations, thus punishing those who further propose real implementation of the idea, either by blocking this implementation or by collecting patent fees ... This the vagueness of computer-related patents is one of the main reasons for which deductions and legal fees are unusually high.

Google and other companies remind the court that earlier to determine whether a patent contains significant inventions, four simple rules were applied, and also note that Alice patents do not satisfy three of them. The document states that Alice patents are only:

• Include fairly obvious points.
• Add non-specific items that do not specify the scope of the patent.
• Limited to ideas in well-defined production conditions.
• They do not add any significant information, and do not specify the specific devices or equipment on which the idea can be implemented.

The companies that signed the document state that “abstract patents are the plague of the high-tech sector” and that “annoyingly large number of patents” does not meet the above criteria. As a result, under the fear of lawsuits, innovators have to either rely on court proceedings, which can make them incur large payments, or pay patent fees for technologies that they have already developed on their own. This is essentially a tax on innovation, and ultimately leads to higher prices for end customers.

In the past few years, we have seen how companies are forced to stray from the path of technical development, being paralyzed by lawsuits. They are forced to pay huge sums in order to protect themselves from lawsuits based on abstract ideas. It seems that the only ones who really profit from this are lawyers. Any strong economy, both in the United States and around the world, is based on the ability of entrepreneurs to come up with some ways to implement ideas for profit. However, to allow someone to acquire the right to possession of such abstract ideas is to lock the possibility of using them for profit.

This document was followed immediately after the loud victory of supporters of the reform of the copyright system, when the famous "Steve Jobs patent" for a multi-touch interface was invalidated by the US Patent Office. It is also worth noting that Apple did not sign this expert opinion.

It is sometimes hard to determine where the “abstract idea” ends and the “invention” is read, but the courts can use the advice of companies to reject claims based on abstract patents as quickly as possible.

Companies conclude that “it’s easy to think about abstract ideas about what a computer or website should look like; however, a much more complex, valuable and important part of innovation should follow: prototyping, analyzing, creating and deploying the interface, software and hardware ensure that the idea is usable in real life. Simply put, to come up with an idea is much easier than to bring it to life. ”