Newsletter
Examination Standards for Software related Patents to be Relaxed in China
At the end of October 2016, the SIPO announced a draft amendment of Patent Examination Guidelines (request for comments), planning to relax the examination standards for software related patent applications so as to encourage technical innovations relating to business methods in the Internet field.
This is good news for the e-commerce industry. According to the draft amendment, if a business method related claim includes business rules and methods as well as technical features, it shall not be excluded from the possibility of being granted a patent.
The draft amendment distinguishes a computer program related invention from a computer program per se, clarifying that the former can be patentable but the latter is not a patentable subject matter. Although a computer program per se and a computer readable medium defined merely by the program recorded thereon are still not acceptable, but it makes clear that claims can be drafted in form of medium and program flow. Moreover, the draft amendment provides that a program may act as an element of an apparatus claim, and the functional module previously defined in Chapter 9, Part II of the Patent Examination Guidelines is revised to be a program module so that it will not be confused with the widely known means plus function.