Facebook, Google, Zynga, Red Hat, Intuit, Dell, Homeaway, and Rackspace have banded together to file an amicus brief with courts in the United States to ask them to not pursue cases that involve vague patent concepts. The eight technology firms have stated that abstract ideas like the recently rejected Steve Jobs patent which wanted ownership of multi-touch functions cause an unnecessary waste of money stifle innovation in the sector.
The move by the technology company’s also has some specific short term goals. They want to reverse a decision by courts which upheld an Alice Corp’s patent claim. The firm stated that it owned the idea of computer-implemented financial intermediation over the CLS Bank. The idea behind the patent is quite simple and Fast Company explains is like this: “the bank creates a “shadow” site, usually in data storage, on which credits and debits can be made. When the transaction is completed–i.e., the person sending the money is found to have enough funds in his account–on the shadow site, then the demand is made to the real site belonging to the financial institution.”
Google and Facebook now argue against this by saying that, “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.”
Source: Fast Company