Eighteen months ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice v. CLS Bank that limited the kinds of software and business methods that can be patented. Few suspected this ruling would have such a profound impact not only on patent enforcement but on American innovation itself.
For what Alice did was make the highest-value new innovations in technology and service models that are increasingly driving margins today — cloud services, big data, machine learning, connectivity, mobility and location-based services, everything on-demand and anything-as-a-service — also the most difficult to patent.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallphelps/2015/12/15/the-mother-of-all-innovation-challenges/
