Simply saying, inventions represent new solutions to technical problems. The word “technique” means “restraining of natural forces and controlled use of natural phenomena” , that is “human activity in the field of material phenomena characterized by space, time, matter and energy” . Thus, the technique is, actually, human activity to master and control nature. Once the domain of technique was c...

The patent system aims at protecting inventions. The requirement that a software invention should make ‘a technical contribution’ turns out to be untenable in practice and this raises the question what constitutes an invention in the realm of software. We develop the Software Invention Cube (SWIC), a classification of software inventions and use this classification to explore the meaning of the...

This paper presents a retrospective of the different epochs in patenting software-related inventions in the European Patent Office (EPO). To put things in perspective, it also makes reference to other jurisdictions as well, in particular USA. The emphasis is however on present EPO practice. Three different epochs are presented and the corresponding approaches to dealing with software-related in...

According to the level of change an invention makes on existing things and how it overrides people's mental schemas on established categories, new inventions can be classified into two groups: incremental inventions (i.e., renovations), which make minor improvements on existing designs, and radical inventions (i.e., innovations), which make major developments that enable people to do things the...