Abstract

Economic growth is based on innovations replacing old technologies, which drive entrepreneurial investments, creating change or creative destruction. Sustained economic growth comes not from imitation but technological innovation.  In the United States software patent law expanded to recognize software patents including business method patents, inventions based on computer-based algorithms which produced tangible results. The result was a rise in industrial and commercial business method patents producing a beneficial economic benefit. The rush to exploit the enlargement in business method patents’ principles, and the new flood of inventions seeking protection that followed challenged the evolving rules of software patents and limiting modifications in the theories and procedures governing business method patents.

Recently China’s State Intellectual Property Office amended the Patent Examination Guidelines to allow software patents for business methods. China’s goals of national development call for increased emphasis on innovation by the private sector. The expansion of business methods patents, similar to the US experience is a way to attain this goal.