Business Method Patents In Canada Now Just One Click Away

The Federal Court has affirmed that business methods are patentable. The Court has just released1 its highly anticipated decision in Amazon.com, Inc. v. Canada (Attorney General)2 quashing the rejection by the Commissioner of Patents (the "Commissioner") of the now infamous Amazon.com 'one-click' patent on the basis that the claimed invention was a business method and not patentable subject matter. In doing so, the Federal Court found that there is no categorical exclusion in Canadian law for so called business method patents; that computer-implemented inventions that achieve "commercially applicable results" are patentable; and that the Commissioner, in attempting to implement policy through application of a "novel legal test" without the support of the Patent Act or Canadian jurisprudence, had committed an error of law "far outside the Commissioner's jurisdiction."

This decision drives home issues highlighted in our July 2010 IP Monitor Canadian Business Beware: Blessing of Business Patents in US Will Affect You.

Background

The patent application at issue claimed a method for internet shopping. The application describes a system whereby a customer enters payment information upon visiting a website. The website stores the information and gives the customer a unique identifier linked to that information, generally in the form of an electronic "cookie". When a customer places an order for a product by a single mouse click, the website uses the customer's identifier to retrieve payment information and creates the order without requiring the customer to log in or input any additional payment information.

The claims were divided into process claims, which claimed the features of the process itself, and system claims, which claimed the physical components necessary to implement the process.

The Commissioner's Decision

The Commissioner rejected both the process and system claims on the basis that they did not claim an invention as defined in section 2 of the Patent Act3 (the "Act").

The Court found that the Commissioner had misapplied foreign and Canadian jurisprudence leading to a number of specific errors in her analysis.

Firstly, the Commissioner departed from the basic principles of purposive claim construction by looking past the language of the claims to the "substance" of the claimed invention. She found that the system claims, which on their face claimed patentable subject matter, namely a machine, "in substance" claimed non-patentable...