Digital-health companies must adopt proactive, creative patent strategies, including an approach that emphasizes hardware even if software is the innovation, in the current challenging intellectual property environment, attorneys say. A primary reason for the challenges is a case called "Alice."
According to legal experts, the precedents from that case could make it very hard for new device-makers in the digital health space to patent software. Although very recent case law...
In 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States made a landmark unanimous ruling on what can be patented and what can't ("patentable subject matter") in the case of Alice...