Alice is the most important decision undermining US tech competitiveness with China
Paul Morinville, 2024 – Founder and Executive Director of US Inventor, Inc.,“Debunking Big Tech’s False Argument: Patent Legislation Won’t Raise Drug Prices” Innovation Gadfly, 4/2, https://innovationgadfly.com/debunking-big-techs-false-argument-patent-legislation-wont-raise-drug-prices/ //DH
The Supreme Court destroyed patent eligibility for entire swaths of tech innovation critical to our national security and economic growth in a 2014 decision called Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International (Alice).
Alice created an unintelligible and undefined exception to patent eligibility called the “abstract idea.” Because nobody knows what qualifies as an abstract idea, Alice gutted the patent protection for most inventions in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, blockchain, 5G/6G, enterprise systems, and much more. These technologies are critical to our national security and economic growth and are the bulk of the 37 of 44 technologies in which China now leads the world.
It is impossible to know exactly how many tech inventions Alice has destroyed, but the number is in the thousands. The courts invalidate around 50% of patents challenged as abstract ideas, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has refused to issue thousands of meritorious patents whose companion applications are patented in China or Germany.