While some bigwigs of the technology world engage in constant legal fights and bickering, giants such as Facebook, Google, Zynga and five others have asked the court to eliminate abstract patents. The appeal came into motion when a CLS Bank sued Alice Corp for infringing four patents covering a computerized method of having a third-party hold funds in escrow on behalf of two other contracting parties. Dell, Intuit, Homeaway, Rackspace and Redhat also joined the league and countered the CLS Bank move. They called phrases such as “on a computer” or “over the Internet“ unworthy of being called patents. As per the appeal made by these giants, such patents hamper innovation. The brief given by these companies to the court has concluded that such patents are harmful for growth of the technology sector. It further stated, “It is easy to think of abstract ideas about what a computer or website should do, but the difficult, valuable, and often groundbreaking part of online innovation comes next: designing, analyzing, building, and deploying the interface, software, and hardware to implement that idea in a way that is useful in daily life. Simply put, ideas are much easier to come by than working implementations”.
