xerox european software patent

Did you come with an idea or an innovative process, or a nice little prototype around him? Are you totally excited and want it on the market and test it out? Hold on a bit, because you have to add your intellectual property.

It takes years to design and develop software products. However, once the product attributes are clearly defined, it does not replicate significant efforts to comply with the software on another platform or language, if it is not patented.

Copyright-protection may be a software product is a new idea or a process? A copyright on the software only protects the exact replication of the software code. A copyright does not protect from another replication of the core process, functional aspects, or the idea of software product. Also, a copyright gives no security, if a similar code is proved to have been independently developed. Patents, on the other hand, an impregnable protection for software products and processes.

The granting of a patent for a software product or process is granted the holder the right to exclude others from making, using or selling of software that have similar functions. In the simplest terms, a software patent protects the innovative software products and processes.

The evaluation of a software product is always dependent on the strength of its patent portfolio. Software patents on the playing field between small and large software companies. A small software company with state of the art patents such as Research In Motion may have a significant presence in the market or domain.

A start with a strong patent portfolio can carve a niche and securely positioned. Take the case of the Bangalore-based startup, Textual Analytics. Concentrated in the area of contextual search on the Internet, this launch a strong patent portfolio. Madan Pandit, CEO of Textual Analytics says: Our software Filed patent applications give us confidence in the Internet search market, also have large and experienced players.

Alan Kay, the inventor of object-oriented programming, once said: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Organizations, whether large or small, use of patents as a means to protect their inventions. For example, Microsoft holds over 5000 patents and some 40,000 IBM patents. Approximately 145,000 software patents have already been adopted by the U.S. Patent Office and some 17,000 new patents issued each year.

Trade secrets can be used to protect an idea in some industries. Coco-Cola GmbH, for example, its Coca-Cola product composition as a business secret. However, it is difficult, software processes as trade secrets, primarily because the inventive concept in a software product can reverse engineering. A significant part of the intellectual property of a software product is exposed on the release of the new product. There is a direct and transparent relationship between the functional aspect or features of the software and the software's internal processes, which requires less effort to reverse engineer the product.

The breadth of intellectual property can be covered by a software patent is significant. Software patents for inventions, the disclosure of physical components, or for the function that they are new and not obvious. Software on their own is not patentable, but the functions it performs are patentable. It is the machine, process or production operations using the software is patentable. Some examples of patented software processes, process, technologies, functions, compile functions, user-interactive software and operating system technologies. Business methods and mathematical algorithms, the use of new manipulation of the language code to a predetermined outcome, even patentable. The above software processes, business methods and mathematical algorithms includes almost everything one can think of in the high-tech industry.

Ash Tankha, U.S. patent attorney, works with inventors to develop their ideas into patent application for worldwide filing and patenting, contact Ash Tankha ash@ipprocurement.com or visit http://www.ipprocurement.com