Trading Technologies, a company based in Chicago has a few software based patents for their trading system and have just filed suit against a UK firm by the name of Man group (a hedge fund company) in the hopes of getting a 2.5 cent contribution per trade on the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Eurex US and Euronext.liffe exchanges. Trading Technologies have stated that their software saves much more then would be provided by the 2.5 cent per trade tax would return.
This quote from Josh Poulson describes three of the software patents.
One of the patents appears to describe any trading order entry system that displays market depth (essentially the difference between highest bid and lowest ask prices) and allows a trader to select (with one click) a region of prices in which to place an order it could affect a large number of home-grown or commercial trading software. The next patent describes the fancy table that is used to describe the market. The third appears to patent the idea of using multiple colors to make a more readable chart, although the added value comes from specifying additional colors to parameters of the table on the fly.
For more detail on the patents and lawsuits see Groklaw. This should start people thinking about the real consequences of Software patents if they can use patent litigation to get a tax on trading transactions. The odd thing about the three patents listed above is that two of them are similiar to what has been used by pricing comparison software and websites for years. Just taking an existing concept and applying it to an alternative subject does not constitute “state of the art” and “non obvious” so at least a couple of the patents should not have been issued in the first place. (Although I am of the opinion that patents that describe software methods shouldn’t be valid at all as they generally help one and hurt many.)