Committee for Software Patents
Committee Chairs
The Software Patents Committee chairs supervise the committee’s work to identify topics, problem areas, and tasks to be solved in the committee’s areas, and to facilitate a global discussion thereof.
Purpose
The Software Patents Committee pursues an objective of furthering knowledge specific to this topic amongst industry participants and their advisors. The committee also seeks to identify and comment upon emerging issues and challenges for the benefit of industry, patent professionals and patent examining bodies. The acceleration of developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning (and most recently, large language models) is highlighting issues relating to inventorship, the patent eligibility of certain technologies and the enabling disclosure required for these emerging technologies.
Challenges
Software systems of various kinds now represent the vehicle through which a significant portion of innovation effort is expressed. This is not only the case for large software and communications companies, and hardware device manufacturers. Industries of all types are finding their most efficient and valuable solutions implemented in a range of integrated hardware and software configurations. Accordingly, there is a need to professionalize what is meant by best practices in the preparation of software patents, and in some cases to simply be able to understand what is and what is not patentable under existing legal regimes.
Activities
The experts involved in the committee come from various backgrounds, and share a deep level of experience and familiarity with the challenges facing emerging software technologies in the patent system. The committee seeks to build ongoing discussion of important issues affecting this area of law. Some of the many topics the committee seeks to address include:
- Recommended guidelines for preparation of software patents, including enabling disclosure and claiming structures
- Rationale for specific technological exclusions before selected Patent Offices, such as machine learning developments agnostic to a specific technical application before the European Patent Office.
- Comparative survey of patent eligibility of software implemented technologies across IP jurisdictions
- Use of large language models in preparation and examination of patent applications
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