I've been working on product development and "customer development" recently, and this has emphasized for me the differences they have in perspective. The first

I've been working on product development and "customer development" recently, and this has emphasized for me the differences they have in perspective. The first (engineering) is about features: how to implement something, what it needs, what would be the cleanest conceptual approach; the second (marketing) is about benefits: what those features mean to someone, is it useful, what can it do, what extra features are needed just to make it work (eg. an editor isn't just about editing: you also need to be able to save your work, even though saving isn't editing). There's a distinction in this case that strikes me as similar: software for its own sake is abstract; software that has a useful application is not abstract. The question then becomes whether the patent as a whole is new and inventive. Just applying an abstract idea to a concrete problem isn't enough; the way it is applied has to be inventive. In legal terms, I think this throws the burden of patentability from "subject matter" to "novel and nonobvious" (Bilsky majority on Flook, emphasis added): > unpatentable under §101, not because it contain[ed] a mathematical algorithm as one component, but because once that algorithm [wa]s assumed to be within the prior art, the application, considered as a whole, contain[ed] no patentable invention. tl;dr you can't patent software, only its doing of something useful EDIT btw, typo in title: s/Bilksi/Bilski/