In May 2013, Judge Moore of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit predicted that the court's decision in CLS Bank Int'l v. Alice Corporation Pty Ltd. would result in the "death of hundreds of thousands of patents, including all business method, financial system, and software patents as well as many computer implemented and telecommunications patents."

In the year that followed, not much changed. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office continued to issue patents in these areas. And the Federal Circuit issued other decisions affirming that software was still patentable. While patents covering financial business methods and purely human activity faced difficulty, patents for non-financial software inventions continued to grant at a fast clip.

Then, in June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion that affirmed the Federal Circuit's decision. The Court's decision in Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd. v CLS Bank Int'l said: "there is no dispute that many computer-implemented claims are formally addressed to patent-eligible subject matter," and subsequent USPTO guidance suggested that "the basic inquiries to determine subject matter eligibility remain the same." Soon afterward, however, the practical effect of the Court's decision became quite different.

In the weeks following the Supreme Court decision, I've seen that the USPTO is rejecting nearly every application assigned to its business methods examining unit for failure to meet the post-Alice patent eligibility standard. Other patent attorneys have noted this too, and have commented on it with concern.

District Courts and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board have been similarly critical of software patents in recent weeks. Dennis Crouch of Patently-O recently published a comprehensive summary of District Court and PTAB decisions that overturned software patents after the Alice decision.

In addition, in one of its first published opinions that addressed the Alice decision, the Federal Circuit found an invention for a computer-implemented method and system for playing bingo to be a mere abstract idea and thus not patent-eligible. Although the case (Planet Bingo LLC v. VKGS LLC) is non-precedential, it may serve as a harbinger of things to come in future software patent cases.

The USPTO is continuing to issue patents for software-related inventions that are assigned to it's non-business-method examining units, so it's clear that at least some software remains eligible for patenting. However, it's also clear that new and potentially significant challenges are now in place for those who want to obtain or enforce software patents in the future.

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