It is not often that the Government does something right, so let us raise a glass of free-range champagne this morning to the pinstriped officials of Her Majesty's Patent Office.
They have for some time been pondering the questions of whether UK patents should be granted for (a) computer software and (b) new ways of doing business. And they have come to broadly the right conclusions.
On the first question they have decided to reaffirm the principle that patents are for technological innovations, and that 'software should not be patentable where there is no technological innovation, and technological innovations should not cease to be patentable merely because the innovation lies in software'. Amen.
On the second issue - of whether so-called 'business method' patents should be allowed under UK law - they have rightly decided that these legal abominations have no attraction for this country.
This is an important and possibly far-reaching victory, because the Government is now committed to trying to persuade its European partners to take the same enlightened view.
A business process or business method patent is essentially a business idea - which may or may not have a technological basis - which is granted the protection of patent law. Going shopping on Wednesdays in a yellow car would be an example of a 'business method' within the meaning of the act. More famous instances are the patents Amazon.com holds on its 'one-click' online ordering process, and on its 'affiliates' programme - under which an affiliate site that signs up with Amazon gets a fee every time a book is bought from Amazon as a result of a click- through from that site.
Now both of these are smart business ideas, but they are not rocket science. Indeed they are not science of any description, and they do not deserve to be protected by patents. Until 1998 they were not, even in the US, despite many hopeful arguments to the contrary by men in suits.
In 1981 the suits got as far as the US Supreme Court - which ruled that methods of doing business were not patentable because they were nothing more than abstract ideas. And abstract ideas (along with 'laws of nature' and 'natural phenomena') were deemed to be beyond the reach of US patent law. This doctrine became known as the 'business method exception'.
All of this changed in 1998 when the US Court of Appeals decided that the exception was, in modern circumstances, 'ill-conceived' and ruled that that a patent claim may be 'directed toward or otherwise involve' a method of doing business.
This judgment opened the floodgates to a raft of business method patents like Amazon's infamous pair. The result is that virtually every conceivable online business idea is now patented by US entrepreneurs.
The long-term insanity of this has been eloquently pointed out by Lawrence Lessig and other distinguished commentators. The unique thing about the internet is that it is the first communications network we've had which is not owned by anyone and which is entirely permissive in what it is used for. Exploitation of the web is limited only by the ingenuity of those seeking to exploit it - which is what has given rise to the explosion of economic and other creativity generated by the web.
But that explosive creativity is precisely what the business method patent is designed to choke off. It means that the first employee a start-up will henceforth require is not an engineer or a gifted marketing director but the lawyer needed to find out who owns the business patents that the new firm intends to exploit, and how much a licence will cost.
This is the nightmare scenario that the UK Patent Office has decided to avoid. So let's hear it for the pin-striped suits.
