Patenting customizations

Patenting Customizations:

A software product may have many innovations. Patents protect innovations from infringement and provide some copyrights assertion for the inventor or software maker so that someone else cannot claim as having ownership of the novelty. Patents can also help protect the maker from losing their competitive edge to someone else copying the idea.  Patents are therefore desirable and can be used to secure mechanisms, processes and any novelty that was introduced into the product.

Customization is the way in which the software maker uses the features out of the box to be more usable for a customer.  It includes automation of workflows that a customer needs over and on top of what the product offers. In the context of a storage product, the automations needed for extract-transform-load of data to and from the product is a classic example of customizations. Many customers have to write their own code to wrap the business logic for data import and export which sometimes calls for vendors to provide solution integration. The smartness is different solution integrations across customer segments can be consolidated and offered as a layer over the storage product. Together with the study of customer use cases and internal storage best practice, the storage product is better able to provide customization that are not only efficient but also convenient for the customer. This mutual tension between the software maker and the customer to do away with excesses on either side is best resolved with a patent.

Let us take the customization example for a storage product a little further. The use of connectors and appenders enhance the use of storage product for data transfers.  Connectors funnel data from different data sources and are typically one per type of source.  Appenders allow data to be written once but propagated to different destinations. A customer may choose to do so as well. However, an out-of-box automation for the said purpose, can be done once by the maker for the benefit of each and every customer. This removes some burden from the customer who would not need to know the internals of the product and would not need to invest in setting up the operations. A simple configuration can facilitate the data transfer. The value additions of the connectors and appenders are immense for the customers while increasing the appeal of the storage product in its ecosystem. Even though some of these automations are routine, they can be enhanced with intelligence for the purposes of inference. All these benefits make the case for a patent.

A patent can only be given when certain other conditions are also met. We will go over these conditions for their applicability to the purpose of customization. 

First, the patent invention must show an element of novelty which is not already available in the field. This body of existing knowledge is called “prior art”. If the product has not been released, customization becomes part of v2 and prevents the gap where a competitor can grab a patent between the releases of the product by the maker as it begins to gain popularity.

Second, the invention must involve an “inventive step” or “non-obvious” step where a person having ordinary skill in the relevant technical field cannot do the same. This is sufficiently met by customization because the way internal operational data is stored and read is best known to the maker since all the components of the product are visible to the maker and best known to their staff.

Third, the invention must be capable of industrial application such that it is not merely a theoretical phenomenon but one that is useful in practice. Fortunately, all product support personnel will vouch for the utility of libraries that can assist with increasing convenience for end-users in mission critical deployments.

Finally, there is an ambiguous criterion that the innovation must be “patentable” under law for a specific country. In many countries, certain theories, creativity, models or discovery are generally not patentable. Fortunately, when it comes to software development, history and tradition serves well just like in any other industry.

Thus, all the conditions of the application for patent protection of innovation can be met. Further, when the invention is disclosed in a manner that is sufficiently clear and complete to enable it to be replicated by a person with an ordinary level of skill in the relevant technical field, it improves the acceptance and popularity of the product.