State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group
State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group announced, Inc., also known as State Street or State Street Bank, was an important case of the American patent law. The responsible federal appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 1998, it first determines the general patentability of software and business processes. The judgment in the case State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group sparked a software patent boom.
It expanded so that the reach of patent law far beyond the previously valid field of applied technology. After the verdict had to inventions only produce results that are useful, concrete and tangible ( useful, concrete and tangible ) are to be patentable. The judgment thus opened the gates to patent previously unpatentable inventions such as scientific theories, business models, survey techniques and management techniques, as well as software (software patents ), etc.. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision In re Bilski has of 30 October 2008 largely offset in the judgment and there declared a " useful, concrete and tangible " test null and void. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Bilski v. Kappos, although the individual decision, but stressed that only the text of 35 USC § 101 was decisive for patentability or non-patentability of software and business methods in its normal, modern, generally accepted meaning and not any derivative, specific Patentierbarkeitstest.
Background
The Signature Financial Group Inc. acquired on 9 March 1993, U.S. Patent 5,193,056 for a "data processing system for hub and spoke financial services". The terminal nodes (spokes ) in this case were mutual funds that have merged their assets in a central node. In order to avoid this construction double tax payments, writes the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for certain methods of accounting, the Signature Financial Group had implemented as software. Here, large portions of the patent voted literally consistent with the requirements of the IRS. The main difference between the patent and the legislation was that the patent explicitly provided for a computer to manage. However, since the tax rules require, among other things, the daily calculation of profits and losses of all partners involved and these funds usually provide a large number of partners involved with extensive holdings, it is unlikely that the tax legislation is sufficient even without a computer could be done.
Method
After Signature had refused to license the patent, also based in Boston bank State Street, State Street challenged the patent. The District Court was competent State Street right in March 1996 and was following the former line of jurisprudence that software is generally not patentable. According to the verdict, a patent on a method of accounting for a business process is equivalent to a patent on the business process. Because such abstract ideas are patentable, neither as a business process more as a mathematical algorithm, and the patent was invalid Signature. With few exceptions, was software as an abstract idea, which have no physical counterpart and therefore did not fall under the patent law.
Only the charge of the Patent Office Federal Court of Appeal rejected this argument explicitly, and thus extended the validity of the patent law from considerably. It summed up the software not as an abstract algorithm, but as a practical application of several algorithms, those known to cause useful, concrete and tangible results. Likewise, the Court wrote in his ruling that it took the opportunity to explain the existing exception for business processes to be void, so that they were now patentable. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in January 1999, bringing the decision of the Court of Appeals in the case was final.
Effects
The extent to which the judgment has really contributed to the boom of software patents and patents on business processes, which are at issue, definitely the number of relevant patents rose to State Street at so dramatic that the Patent and Trademark Office from a " hysterical reaction" to the ruling saying,. Overall, the number of patents grew between 1997 and 1998 by over 30%, much of the increase was attributable to software and business process patents. The number of software patents doubled between 1997 and 1998 to 1016, where in 1999 alone, 15,000 additional registrations followed. In just the first six months of State Street, the number of applications to business processes by 40%.
In the following years, State Street established as a model case for the boom in patents on abstract ideas and the case-law changing. As early as 1999 noted another federal court that everything in principle patentable. In the following years there was a sharp increase in patent applications from sectors such as insurance, financial services or the advertising industry, whose products were previously considered non- patentable.