

US government opposes Microsoft in Supreme Court patent lawsuit - kenjackson
http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/03/21/us-government-opposes-microsoft-in-supreme-court-patent-lawsuit/

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kenjackson
From the article: _“If patents are too easy to invalidate, the risk of
invalidation – as well as the prospect that every infringement suit will be
met with a burdensome validity challenge – may raise the cost of enforcing a
patent to the point where the expected value of the patent cannot justify the
outlays entvation (sic),” the government’s brief states.

“By allowing a lay jury to second-guess the PTO’s judgment even in close
cases,” it continues, “the preponderance standard would diminish the expected
value of patents and would reduce future inventors’ incentives to innovate and
to disclose their inventions to the public.”_

This seems like one of the best steps toward ending SW patents. If you can't
knock them off the books, effectively make them toothless. Of course the US
government is strongly in favor of the status quo.

