Research On Patent Protection Of Business Method

?In the traditional Patent Law theory, business methods were excluded from the object of patent protection, because they were the general intelligence activities' rules and the "known to the public" knowledge. However, as more and more business methods in combination with computer hardware have been introduced into the network and financial activities, a number of major international enterprise groups began to appeal vigorously to provide the patent protection to the business methods in order to gain first-mover advantage and return on investment in the network economy. Under such circumstances, the United States took the lead in the abolition of the principle of business method exception. In"the State Street Bank & Trust"case, the computer-implemented business methods granted the status of the patent object by judicial recognition, which creates a precedent of business method patent protection. Subsequently, a business method patent war was triggered on a global scale, and business method patent application and the granted quantity started to rise dramatically in the United States, Europe, Japan and other developed regions or countries.Although the business method's patentability has been disputed highly, but the United States,Japan and other major countries have allowed to authorize business method patent has been an indisputable fact, and the countries everywhere, "staking their claims," have the trend expanding this patent war to the worldwide scale. The direct cause behind this is related to a huge national interest. Now what is urgently to need to solve is not that the commercial method should been granted the patent protection or not, but rather how to be protected. Awards the patent in the commercial method invention the substantive conditions (Novelty, Inventiveness, Usefulness) examination aspect, the United States, Japan, Europe and other major developed countries are not uniform about the criteria, which is a problem waiting for the main developed country to make joint efforts to solve.Facing this business patent war, how should our government and enterprises to deal with? According to China's laws, business methods are not absolutely excluded from patent protection gate outside .Overall, however, the attitude of our country is uncertain. The author thought, that it is not the wise move waiting and seeing negatively, taking some positive policies and measures to deal is urgently needed.This paper is divided into three parts. Through introducing and discussing the commercial method's basic concept and characteristics and the substantive condition examination that the main developed country awards the business method invention patent rights, and proposed some target-oriented counter measures according to our country's actual situation. In the process of writing, the author looked up large amount of document data, utilized the methods such as dialectical method, comparison method, economic analysis's method, law interpretation method to carry on the elaboration and the research.