Patent law is not something that most people find all that entertaining. Or all that easy to understand, for that matter. Until now.
Together, an artist and law researcher have teamed up to create Law Comics, a comic series that makes famous legal cases easy for the general public to understand. In the first comic of the series, PhD candidate Julia Powles and artist Ilias Kyriazis have taken patent law, the “metaphysics of law,” as Julia puts it, and compared it to a baseball game. The comic is named “Alice in Patentland,” and it is about the recent patent decision of the US Supreme Court in Alice Corporation vs CLS Bank International.
The comic breaks down patent law into bases, showing the steps and requirements to obtain a patent. First base is “enabled,” second base is “novel,” third base is “nonobvious,” and home plate is “useful.” The comic likens the invention to a baseball, saying that the ball must be in the strike zone, meaning patent eligible. The only issue in the Alice vs CLS Bank case was the strike zone. Inventions that are considered patent ineligible are abstract ideas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena. The big argument in the Alice case was whether the Alice Corp patent was an abstract idea.
Julia says she will be collaborating with several artists to produce more Law Comics in the future. She says, “The aim is to animate the magnificent stories of law to engage and empower the curious public.”
Read original article and see “Alice in Patentland” here.