
New Limits on Patents - MEHOM
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/business/01bizcourt.html?ex=1335672000&en=94549e001c9586d3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
======
ced
"ordinary innovation", "a common sense standard", "dramatically broadened the
standard of obviousness"

Surreal. I looked for related articles, and I found:

Court cases threaten weaker patents and could hinder technological innovation,
<http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070501/BUSINESS01/705010325/1066/BUSINESS01>

Supreme Court ruling could squeeze Big Pharma,
<http://money.cnn.com/2007/05/01/news/companies/patent/?postversion=2007050209>

Supreme Court Patent Ruling Wont Affect Us, [patent holder] DataTreasury
Says, <http://www.digitaltransactions.net/newsstory.cfm?newsid=1343>

I'd say that anything that is _that_ vague and imprecise is a net loss for us.
It empowers lawyers to find creative interpretations, and thus, it helps big
cos.

------
Prrometheus
I'm excited for the software industry by any development that loosens patent
rights. However, I am also concerned for medicine and other capital-intense
industries that need strong patent laws to make innovation worthwhile. Why
can't we have separate patent laws for separate industries? If our goal is "to
encourage the useful arts", then this makes perfect sense.

Basically, an inventor needs an expected value return of X to have the
incentive to invent, where X is the amount that invention costs (including
opportunity costs). X is billions of dollars in pharma and only a few thousand
in software.

Look which companies line up on different sides of any patent debate. It's
informative.

~~~
Prrometheus
Also, X is insanely low on many creative works (with the exception of high-
budget movies)

~~~
MEHOM
It takes a lot of internal centering, vision and experience to be creative.
Sometimes people get lucky w/ one idea between the age of 21-30. Them they
"peter" out for the rest of their lives.

------
sabat
Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last! Woohooooo!

~~~
brlewis
I don't think so. It's the most software-patent-friendly SC decision ever. Of
course, the question before them wasn't the validity of the patent. Still, it
helps cement the current mess we have in flagrant violation of previous SC
precedents (Diehr, etc.)

<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-1056.ZS.html>

------
MEHOM
For those who are too lz to click the link.

///// _____May 1, 2007 High Court Puts Limits on Patents By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, April 30  The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling
in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that
combine elements of pre-existing inventions.

If the combination results from nothing more than ordinary innovation and
does no more than yield predictable results, the court said in a unanimous
opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection
conveys. Were it otherwise, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion,
patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.

Because most inventions combine previously known elements, the courts
approach to deciding what sort of combination is so obvious as to be
ineligible for patent protection will have widespread application. The result
will be to make patents harder to obtain and defend.

Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary
course without real innovation retards progress, Justice Kennedy said. He
added that such patents were also undesirable because they might deprive
earlier innovations of their value or utility.

Patent law experts said the ruling created a common sense standard that could
have a broad impact.

Nearly every patent that contains a combination of prior ideas is at risk
because the court has dramatically broadened the standard of obviousness,
said Cynthia Kernick, an intellectual property lawyer at Reed Smith in
Pittsburgh.

Judges will have more leeway to dismiss patent infringement lawsuits without
requiring a jury trial, and patent examiners, who generally grant patent
applications unless they find prior references to the same invention, will now
feel freer to deny claims, said Matthew Kreeger, an intellectual property
lawyer at Morrison and Foerster in San Francisco.

And we could see thousands of cases asking the Patent Office to re-examine
patents it has already granted, said Mr. Kreeger, who was one of the lawyers
who had prepared a brief filed by the Biotechnology Industry Organization in
support of the patent. It doesnt take a lot of resources to ask for a re-
examination. To be eligible for a patent, an invention must be novel, useful
and not obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field. The Supreme
Court case concerned a fairly typical dispute over whether a combination of
old elements in a new way was new or simply obvious to any expert.

At issue was an adjustable gas pedal for use on cars and trucks equipped with
electronic engine controls. How could the vehicles computer tell the pedals
position? A Canadian company, KSR International, under contract to General
Motors, solved the problem by mounting an electronic sensor at the pedals
fixed pivot point in order to communicate the necessary information.

A rival, Teleflex Inc., demanded royalties, claiming the device infringed its
patent on an adjustable gas pedal equipped with an electronic sensor. KSR
refused to pay on the ground that Teleflex had combined existing elements in
an obvious manner and that its patent was therefore invalid. KSR won in
Federal District Court in Detroit, but that decision was overturned in 2005 by
the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

That court, in Washington, has exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals.
After years of permitting its judgments to stand unreviewed, the Supreme Court
has begun to take an active interest in the Federal Circuits cases and has
overturned several, including a second case the justices decided on Monday in
favor of Microsoft in a dispute with AT&T.;

In granting judgment for KSR on Monday, in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex
Inc., No. 04-1350, the Supreme Court listed several specific errors and
fundamental misunderstandings in how the Federal Circuit had analyzed the
case. In looking at the Teleflex patent, Justice Kennedy said, the appeals
court made the mistake of considering what a pedal designer writing on a
blank slate would have done to solve the problem of the pedal and the sensor.
But the slate was not blank, he continued, and the Teleflex patent was
essentially an upgrade of existing technology.

Justice Kennedy said the problem was not necessarily the Federal Circuits
overall approach, but rather its rigid way of applying a commonly used legal
test. The test requires a person challenging a patent as obvious to identify a
reason that would have prompted someone to combine two or more previous
inventions, such as published articles suggesting such a combination. This has
made it difficult to attack a patent as obvious, and has often precluded
summary judgment, instead requiring an expensive jury trial.

Justice Kennedy said that this test, in the Federal Circuits hands, had led
to a constricted analysis that paid too much attention to an inventors
motivation and too little to a simpler inquiry: whether there existed at the
time of invention a known problem for which there was an obvious solution.
The Teleflex patent fit that description, he said.

The federal government, which had sided with KSR, argued that the Federal
Circuits approach had led to the granting of too many patents to obvious
inventions. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry groups, entering the
case for Teleflex, argued that innovation would suffer if patents became too
hard to defend.

In a sense, the case presented a moving target. While the KSR appeal was
pending, the Federal Circuit issued several decisions reflecting openness to
challenges to patents as unworthy because of obviousness. Those decisions, of
course, are not before us now, Justice Kennedy said.

Court Sides With Microsoft

WASHINGTON, April 30 (AP)  The Supreme Court sided with the Microsoft
Corporation on Monday, finding that patent law does not apply to software sent
to foreign countries.

In a 7-1 decision, the court rejected AT&T;s position that it was entitled to
damages for every Windows-based computer made outside the United States using
technology that compresses speech into computer code.

AT&T; had said computers running the Windows operating system infringed on its
technology for a digital speech coder system.

The decision could affect other lawsuits against Microsoft and save it
billions because of the global scope of its operations.

The Supreme Court said software should be treated like exported blueprints and
schematics.

