EFF criticizes US patent office for granting patent on app permissions

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US civil rights organization, has criticized a patent awarded by the Patent Office. The patent has been assigned to the bank JP Morgan Chase and concerns the permission to allow an app to communicate with another app.

The EFF discusses the patent in its “Silly Patent of the Month” series, in which the organization more often highlights unfortunate patents. In the current case, it concerns a patent that was applied for in 2013 and was awarded this week to the bank JP Morgan Chase. In it, the organization describes a system with which an app requests permission to communicate with another app. In doing so, the first app checks whether a particular other app is present on the user’s device.

The civil rights organization writes that the patent makes it clear that the system can work on all kinds of mobile devices. As a result, it is very broad and also in 2013, an average person should have noticed that this is not a new idea, according to the EFF. The organization cites a number of examples of apps that around that time already requested permission to use data from other apps, such as Twitter.

The patent’s approval, according to the EFF, is an indication to many that the Patent Office is “very bad at investigating software patents.” The organization would operate in a ‘different reality’, in which ideas are all registered in patents. For example, the current patent would have been approved by only looking at other patents and not at practice.

Description of the process in the patent

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