Software Patent Survives Alice Even Where Invention Could be Performed Manually or in Human Mind

A district court recently held that a software decompiler patent was not invalid for lack of patentable subject matter. The decision comes less than four months after the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision that shifted the rules for software  patents and opened the doors to a flood of challenges in front of the PTAB. The court found the invention not invalid despite the parties agreeing that the invention could be performed manually or by a human mind, which had previously doomed software patents.

 

The software at issue was a decompiler program. For background, source code is not readable by a computer, and must be converted into an intermediary file, which is then assembled into a binary code readable by the computer. Binary code is not readable by humans, so some programs can operate in reverse and “decompile” the binary code into a human-readable representation. These are called decompiler programs.

 

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