Software patents can afford smaller companies market protection by preventing larger companies from stealing work done by a smaller organization, leveraging their greater resources to go to market before the smaller company can.
One thing that makes the patent application process complex is that describing software technology and innovations is often difficult. This is because they entail abstract ideas, making it difficult to understand and establish whether the innovation should enjoy copyright protection.
One of the major benefits of software patents is their commercial value. These protections are valuable because they reward inventors and reward them for their commercially valuable inventions.
If you want to protect your software through the patent system, you must submit a patent application. Your application must describe your invention in detail (the specification), should include drawings, and must truthfully name the inventors of the invention.
Copyrights safeguard the invention's expression, including sequences and structuring, and are commonly obtained for the source code of software. Patents, on the other hand, afford much broader protections as copyrights would not stop someone else from creating their own code that implemented the same method.
The simple answer is yes, you can patent software. However, there are strict rules to follow as to what software or software-related inventions can be patented.
For software or an app to be patentable it needs to meet specific criteria. A patentable invention must provide a technical solution to a technical problem. This means the software or application should offer something beyond a simple business method or abstract idea—it must contribute to the way technology functions.
In order for software to be patentable, it must meet the same requirements of any other type of invention. In particular, a software invention must be new, useful, and non-obvious. A fourth requirement is that the invention be of a type that is eligible for patent protection.
A software invention, for example, could be protected under copyrights (how human expression authored computer-readable code), patents (a useful, novel, and non-obvious method, device, or system), or both.