Throughout time industries have developed techniques and processes that are believed to be essential elements that contributed to the company’s success. For almost as long, companies have sought and devised ways to protect those techniques and processes that constituted the company’s intellectual property. Many companies turned to federal patent protection, others chose to treat the information as trade secrets and others chose to use contractual obligations to protect their intellectual property. These various forms of protection were especially meaningful in what might be termed soft industries like banking, financial advice, sales transactions, supply chain management and the like. This information was not specifically directed at a product, but was directed at the things that made it possible to produce and sell a product. In many ways this intellectual property may be called business intelligence. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Alice v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014), has made it more difficult to use patents to protect business intelligence.
In Alice, the Supreme Court found a software patent to be invalid on the basis that the patent embodied an abstract idea and the patent claims did nothing more than take that abstract idea and place it in a computer environment. The court stated, “We conclude that the method claims, which merely require generic computer implementation, fail to transform that abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention.” To be patentable, a claim must do significantly more than embody an abstract idea. In other words, the claim must go beyond that which a human could theoretically do through normal human activities. As an example, the logistics of a distribution system could be set out on paper, so using a computer to do the same operation faster on a spreadsheet does not result in patentable subject matter.
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