The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the patent-friendly court that has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has agreed to reconsider a controversial decision to approve a financial software patent. CLS Bank has accused Alice Corp. of violating its patents claiming a computerized strategy of having a trusted third-party hold funds in escrow on behalf of two other contracting parties. All judges on the appeals court will now have a chance to review the divided July decision of a three-judge panel to approve the patents.

The July decision alarmed the technology industry. An amicus brief filed by Google, Twitter, HP, and Red Hat urged the appeals court to reconsider the decision. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge also filed a brief urging reconsideration. On Tuesday, the Federal Circuit heeded their cries and announced that it would rehear the case en banc, meaning that all judges on the court would participate in the case.

It's a little bit baffling that the rehearing is even required. As Judge Sharon Prost wrote in her dissent to the original ruling, "the majority has failed to follow the Supreme Court's instructions—not just in its holding, but more importantly in its approach." In 2010, the Supreme Court rejected a patent on "a method for managing the consumption risk costs of a commodity sold by a commodity provider" for being too abstract. The patents at issue in this case claim a similarly abstract financial strategy, with the key difference that the strategy is to be implemented on a computer. But the Supreme Court has made it clear that merely implementing a mathematical formula on a computer does not transform it into a patentable invention.

In its brief urging the court to reconsider the case, Google and the other tech companies wrote that "a disturbing number of high-tech patents amount to no more than describing an abstract idea at a high level of generality and saying to perform it on a computer or over the Internet- without providing any of the specifics that transform abstract ideas into patentable inventions."

Perhaps the full Federal Circuit will take this as an opportunity to invalidate this kind of broad software patent. And if the Federal Court upholds the patent, we'll be rooting for another unanimous reversal by the Supreme Court.