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Cook , Trevor --- "The prejudice against patenting business methods" [2020] ELECD 20; in Aplin, Tanya (ed), "Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) 302

Book Title: Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies

Editor(s): Aplin, Tanya

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: The prejudice against patenting business methods

Author(s): Cook , Trevor

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

This chapter starts by seeking to trace the historical background in the UK to the current prejudice, worldwide, against business method patenting, suggesting that such prejudice lacks much by way of clearly or consistently articulated policy rationale and would seem to be more a matter of historical accident rather than intention. It then summarises the recent and current approaches of the EPO and three other leading jurisdictions – Australia, China and the US – to the issue. In so doing it looks primarily at the legal basis for the exclusion and at any express policy justifications for it. It suggests that there is little real difference between an exclusion based on the apparently abstract nature of pure business methods and one that is based on their nontechnological nature. It concludes that the increasingly technological nature of business will in future restrict the application in practice of the exclusion, as business methods become increasingly embedded in and integrated with the technical systems used to implement them, making it ever more difficult in practice to separate them from such technical systems.


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