
Supreme Court orders do-over on key software patent ruling - llambda
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/supreme-court-orders-do-over-on-key-software-patent-ruling/
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codeka
I never saw this one the first time around, but the judge's ruling sounds
crazy to me. It basically boils down to "I don't understand this, so it must
be patentable."

I'm really staring to rethink my opinion on those "learn to program"/"don't
learn to program" arguments. Certainly for anyone making descisions that
affect software development - a first year computer science student could see
that showing an ad before showing a video is trivial.

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antidoh
Why would this take any sort of CS education? They've patented when to show a
commercial.

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georgemcbay
If you dress any action up with enough fancy technical terms, you can easily
confuse the non-technical into thinking what you are doing must be pretty
advanced and thus worthy of some sort of protection.

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jinushaun
_Samuels [of the EFF] also argued that "merely tying an abstract idea to the
Internet" isn't enough to render it patentable. "Everything we're doing is
online" these days, she said. Under the reasoning of the original Ultramercial
decision, people can "take all kinds of abstract ideas, say it's happening on
the Internet, and get a patent."_

This covers so many bad patents in the wild right now... Make it wireless or
put it on the internet and suddenly it's a new idea/invention. BS.

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sparknlaunch12
> _"The Supreme Court has ruled several ideas to be outside the bounds of what
> can be patented, including an algorithm for converting between binary number
> formats, the concept of hedging against the risk of commodity price changes,
> and the process of adjusting the dosage of a drug based on measured levels
> of a particular chemical in a patient's blood."_

These all sound so fluffy but I guess there must be people out there trying to
patent these type of things. Are they saying you can no longer patent a
'process'?

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eridius
Regardless of the argument about whether this is an abstract idea or a
patentable invention, how the heck did this even pass the "obvious" test?

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bunderbunder
What's painfully pedestrian to the proficient can be profoundly esoteric to
the uninitiated.

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spacemanaki
But it's not about whether it's esoteric to the uninitiated, right? Rejecting
patents over obviousness is about obviousness to someone proficient in the
field.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_having_ordinary_skill_in_the_art)

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_delirium
It's a bit tricky, though, because typically it's people who are _not_ skilled
in the art who must decide whether it would have been obvious to someone
skilled in the art. Of course, if it goes to trial they can have expert
witness testimony and attempt to build a clearer understanding of its
(non-)obviousness, but ultimately the question doesn't get decided by a panel
of experts skilled in the art.

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bunderbunder
And both sides can usually readily find an expert witness to argue their side
of the case. Unfortunately, deciding which one's got the plausible story and
which one is just blowing smoke and mirrors might be something that only an
expert is competent to do. Judges and juries, maybe not so much.

