After about seven years of litigation, a software patent dispute between CLS Bank International and Alice Corp. wrapped up Thursday with a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in favor of CLS.
Alice v. CLS Bank International, the first Supreme Court case on the patentability of software since Gottschalk v. Benson (1972), presented claims about a computer-implemented, electronic escrow service for facilitating financial transactions, but the high court said those claims were ineligible for patent protection. The claims were reduceable to an abstract idea, but implementing that idea on a computer was not enough to transform it to a patentable invention, the court said.
