
Abstract software patents struck down by Supreme Court - chaqke
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/bad-day-bad-patents-supreme-court-unanimously-strikes-down-abstract-software
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deciplex
>We will work to ensure the Federal Circuit—the court that hears all patent
appeals—diligently applies the new filter on patentability.

Doesn't the Federal Circuit have something of a history on cases such as this,
where they essentially say 'fuck it, we're not listening to the SCOTUS', and
continue to rule as they please? What's to stop them from just doing business
as usual in defiance of the Supreme Court?

~~~
jackgavigan
Chief Justice Roberts will send Justices Kennedy and Ginsburg around to make
an example of one of the Federal Circuit justices.

Kind of like how the Mob do business but will gavels instead of baseball bats.

"Ya know, that's a really nice bench ya got there. It'd be a pity if something
were to happen to it..."

PS: I think the premise of the Supreme Court justices enforcing their
judgments, Mafia enforcer-style, would make a great graphic novel. I can see
Ginsburg going all Tommy DeVito on some Federal Circuit judge's ass and
burying the body in the Rose Garden.

~~~
zedadex
One of my favorite Onion videos to date is "Supreme Court Rules Death Penalty
'Totally Badass'." Complete with court sketches and everything.

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andy_ppp
It is indeed totally badass:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyph_DZa_GQ&feature=kp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyph_DZa_GQ&feature=kp)

~~~
tim333
Awesome

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briantakita
> the Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely adding “a generic computer to
> perform generic computer functions” does not make an otherwise abstract idea
> patentable. This statement (and the opinion itself) makes clear that an
> abstract idea along with a computer doing what a computer normally does is
> not something our patent system was designed to protect.

This opinion gives me hope that reform is possible & that the U.S. government
still works with reason.

Now the question is are patents still relevant in today's world of internet,
rapidly accelerating innovation, and evidence that free/open source research
reduces costs?

~~~
rayiner
Each generation of CPU design or gas turbine design or wireless baseband
design, drug design, or nuclear power plant design still takes more R&D money
than the last. And nobody was working on a competitive open source LTE
baseband last I checked.

"Accelerating innovation" is something which, if it exists, touches only a few
areas of engineering. In most areas of engineering, innovation has gotten more
expensive, not less. Very few things are amenable to a distributed group of
hackers working on it. Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of
PhD's. And those cost lots of money.

We can argue about how necessary patents ever were, but I don't think they're
any less necessary today.

The question, in my opinion, isn't whether patents are still relevant. Its
whether we can draw lines better to leave out less useful ones while keeping
that exception from swallowing the patent system. E.g. if a power control
module for an LTE radio is patentable if implemented in an ASIC, should it
become unpatentable when you implement it in a DSP? If not: how do you allow
those patents while invalidating Amazon's One Click shopping patent? To a
certain extent, its tempting to just say: "its too hard to draw the lines, its
not worth the trouble." That's easy to say if you're not Qualcomm and don't
have a dozen companies who'd love to use your work for free.

~~~
richardw
_Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD 's. And those cost
lots of money._

Possibly the wrong example for your argument :) Jet engines can now be
designed by a team at SpaceX rather than at NASA, and the team can 3D-print
them. That seems like reduced-cost innovation compared to decades past.

[http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-
musk-m...](http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-
makes-3-d-printing-history.aspx)

(PS - I definitely don't disagree with your general point, but it might be
becoming harder to know which areas need patents and which don't.)

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chc
I'm not quite sure what difference you're pointing out. Why does is matter if
the PhDs are at SpaceX or NASA?

~~~
richardw
Yes, I'm aware they aren't delegating the rocket design to the marketers.
Smaller team, faster to market, cheaper. The discussion is around accelerating
innovation and SpaceX perfectly demonstrates this, despite "rocket engines"
being the earlier example given for how it's not true.

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chc
This is about the same thing that's already on the front page with 70
comments, including a great one by grellas. I'd go there if you're interested
in this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160)

~~~
greenyoda
That post was just a link to the actual Supreme Court decision. This article
explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal
scholars to understand, so I think it serves a useful purpose.

~~~
icambron
> This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people
> who aren't legal scholars to understand

I really strongly disagree with this. Supreme Court decisions are usually
quite readable and will give a you a nuanced overview of the legal background
and justifications for the ruling. They're usually very accessible and not
nearly as crammed with legal jargon as you might guess. I try to read as many
important decisions as I can and I have no legal training at all. I only
occasionally have to look up a term. I would say they're easier, on average,
for me to read than a CS paper. And after reading a few Scotus papers, you'll
have a much deeper understanding of how our legal system works, and of course
a great deal more about the individual decisions. You'll even read news
articles about a decision and say, "That's not what the decision was about at
all!"

Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long, and there's nothing wrong
with a summary article like this one. But my point is that you shouldn't fear
the legalese.

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jallmann
> Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long

Interestingly, judges such as Richard Posner think recent opinions are too
long.

[http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-
justices-s...](http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-justices-
should-cut-bs-from-opinions) (Ignore the linkbait title; the article really is
quite good.)

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spacemanmatt
This is great ammo for all the jack-wagons I encounter in daily life who
counter my position on patents with the genius position, "What if someone came
and just took your house, or your car away. That's your property and you
wouldn't like it, would you?"

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lostinpoetics
while the decision is pretty tightly tailored, it seems like it's SCOTUS' way
of opening the door for subsequent arguments regarding pure software patents.
take google's page rank patent[1]. one could argue that assigning scores to,
say, academic papers based on references cited and then doing that repeatedly
is an "abstract idea" and google's recitation of "apply[ing] it" using a
computer is not enough to enter into patent eligible subject matter. if you
read/listen to the oral argument, the counter argument that doing so on a
massive scale is impracticable was flatly rejected. indeed, a million monkeys
counting the citations of scholarly pubs could probably perform that method on
a decent sized corpus. is the method therefore inherently abstract? will be
interesting to see if Alice alters the analysis (albeit slightly) for these
types of questions and whether we'll see a pure software issue (without the
negative financial/business method clouds in the background) sooner rather
than later.

[1]
[http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999](http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999)

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mtdewcmu
What exactly is an abstract idea? Is it possible for an idea to be concrete?

From looking at examples, "abstract" seems to mean trivial. By trivial, I
don't mean obvious or silly, I mean small; i.e. an idea that can be reduced to
one or two sentences, like "e-commerce shopping cart."

Otherwise it's pretty hard to distinguish ideas about software from ideas
about hardware and explain why one is more patentable than the other.

~~~
nardi
An abstract idea isn't physical. You can patent a machine, or a drug. You
can't patent a method for dividing two numbers. However, a _machine_ for
dividing two numbers—assuming it's novel, not obvious, etc.—is fair game.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Ok, but what's actually protected is the idea behind the machine, right? A
different machine that employed the patented idea would infringe the patent.

Maybe what is meant by "abstract idea" is really "an idea in the abstract,"
i.e. an idea that is not used to make a machine can't be patented; it's the
employment of the idea that is patentable.

~~~
nardi
You're getting confused by the word "idea." You patent a machine, not an idea.
If you insist on saying that you patent the "idea" for a machine, then what
you _can 't_ patent is an "idea about an idea." Ideas about machines are good.
Ideas about ideas are no good. Make sense?

~~~
mtdewcmu
I think I understand patents as well as any average non-lawyer. What I'm
trying to do is make sense of the language used to describe patents. It's
clear that people can't agree on what they are, because the Supreme Court
keeps needing to step in and refine the definition. The language seems not to
make sense, which would help to explain why people can't agree on what they
are.

Ok, you patent a machine. But that statement is vague and ambiguous at best.
If I patent a machine that I built, then how could the patent apply to a
different machine that I didn't build? Yet, that's the whole point: they apply
to classes of machines, including machines that haven't even been built at the
time that the patent is granted. The class would seem to be inherently
something abstract.

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higherpurpose
My favorite part about this is that it shows how idiotic USPTO is for
approving such patents in the first place. Hopefully, this will make them
reconsider whether they should be approving other types of patents, too,
before the Supreme Court puts them in a bad light again, but I'm not holding
my breath.

~~~
spacemanmatt
They do not care.

~~~
moron4hire
They can't care. They don't set policy, Congress does. They just act out
Congress' laws.

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dsplatonov
"Admittedly, the Supreme Court did not offer the clearest guidance on when a
patent claims merely an abstract idea, but it did offer guidance that should
help to invalidate some of the more egregious software patents out there."
Where can i find this guidance?

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jebblue
Despite EFF syndrome, patents are a tool, they are not evil, patent trolls are
evil, patents are just tools.

~~~
andy_ppp
This was always going to be the case eventually (a task that was already
performed, this just invalidates adding "on a computer").

It's much harder for the law (I would say impossible) to actually judge stuff
that is obvious. For example wavelet patents in certain video codecs are
absurd - improving fourier transforms in a very very obvious way - but it
won't be obvious to a judge or a jury and certainly isn't covered by this
supreme court decision.

The more specialised people become in certain fields the more 'obvious'
discoveries become. The law has no means to understand what rights it's
protecting, and for how long they should be protected, which means it will
never police the patent's system effectively, no matter what this judgement
says.

Given how fast software patents and technology change and that the law can't
judge them effectively I would suggest that instead of all this mess can we
not just have software patents that last a maximum of 5 years.

