Planalytics Weather-based Financial Index
Just days after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Bilski, the USPTO granted a patent (US 7752106 B1 published on 06-Jul-2010) to Planalytics, Inc. for the invention of a system, method, and computer program product for predicting a weather-based financial index value.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to financial indexes, and more specifically, to a weather-based financial index.
2. Related Art
Weather provides risk in a financial marketplace. For example, weather may effect the price of a security, an equity, or a commodity. Several techniques have been introduced in an attempt to provide protection against weather-related risks. For example, weather futures may be traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. In another example, over-the-counter derivatives, which are based on the average temperature over a predetermined time with respect to a reference temperature, may be traded as swaps or options. However, such risk management techniques generally do not provide liquidity and have been shunned by the financial markets.
What is needed is a method, system, and/or computer program product that addresses one or more of the aforementioned shortcomings of conventional weather-related risk management techniques.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
A weather-based financial index is based at least in part on weather. The index may take into account any of a variety of weather factors, such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, number of sunny or overcast days in a period of time, number of freeze days in a period of time, etc. The weather-based financial index includes one or more financial components, each of which may be described as the price per reference unit of a commodity, an equity instrument, or an income instrument. Weather factor value(s) are combined with component(s) to provide the weather-based financial index. Components and/or weather factor values may be combined with respective weighting factors
The weather-based financial index may be traded on an exchange, such as the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). The value of the index may be calculated based on any period, such as daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, etc. Historical values of the index may be used to predict future values of the index.
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In a recent blog post on IP Watchdog, patent attorney Gene Quinn dissected the Bilski decision, concluding:
A fair reading of the Bilski case is that all 9 Justices said the claims in Bilski were not patentable because they did not represent an invention. The Bilski claims were nothing more than an abstract idea, or a concept. But could you have patented the Bilski process? Yes if there was a “there” there, which there was not unfortunately for Bilski.
Nevertheless, if a client came into your office could you get them a patent on the “innovation” present in Bilski? I think the answer is clearly yes. I said this to a former patent examiner I work with today and he initially laughed. By the end of the conversation I got him to come around to agreeing with me.
I’m not sure anyone could have saved the Bilski application, but if you could have written it yourself with an eye toward the Machine or Transformation test the specification would have been heavy on technology and processes that were tied to the technology. You would have made sure that there were process steps described in the specification and in the claims that could not have been carried out disembodied from the technology. In short, you would have removed the pen and paper argument by making sure that the innovation as described and claimed could not in any way be infringed by pen and paper only. So yes, I could have written an application that would have had patentable claims for Bilski, but it would have looked a lot different. I’m sure others could have done the same. The difference in the Bilski application as it was and the Bilski application as it could be is that it would have defined a concrete invention.
Is this weather-based financial index patent application so written to effectively meet the tests in Bilski? Did the patent examiner in this application follow the guidelines in the recent USPTO memo following Bilski? What do our experienced readers think?
