The Supreme Court’s June ruling on the patentability of software – its first in 33 years – raised as many questions at it answered. One specific software patent went down in flames in the case of Alice v. CLS Bank, but the abstract reasoning of the decision didn’t provide much clarity on which other patents might be in danger.
Now a series of decisions from lower courts is starting to bring the ruling’s practical practical consequences into focus. And the results have been ugly for fans of software patents. By my count there have been 10 court rulings on the patentability of software since the Supreme Court’s decision – including six that were decided this month. Every single one of them has led to the patent being invalidated.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that all software patents are in danger – these are mostly patents that are particularly vulnerable to challenge under the new Alice precedent. But it does mean that the pendulum of patent law is now clearly swinging in an anti-patent direction. Every time a patent gets invalidated, it strengthens the bargaining position of every defendant facing a lawsuit from a patent troll.
Great news.
If the issues of software patents and net neutrality get solved, I think the output of many tech bloggers will decrease by about half, as they won’t be able to make the same points at least a dozen times a week
And my RSS feed will be much less cluttered as well.
You could also choose not to read the articles. But apparently you want the articles you don’t like to disappear.
Many people wants things they dislike to disappear instead to mind their own business, go figure. Perhaps the thrill of feeling upset/disgusted/angry/better/knowledgeable/whatever…
Kochise
Or maybe, juuuust maybe, he could be like me and want a little variety to his tech news instead of the “eeew patents suck!” meme replayed a billion fricking times?
Its the same way somebody at Apple can let loose a really eggy fart and we’ll hear about it for a fricking week, its NOT a game changer, does NOT change in any way, shape, or form how things run here and a good 90% of it is NOTHING but author opinion so this is news…how exactly?
Allow old Hairy to offer a solution, if the ONLY thing you can come up with to run is more than 80% author opinion and is the kind of crap that would show up on Slash’s YRO column? For the love of all that is good and decent in the universe DO NOT RUN IT but instead go to Dailyrotation.com or Freshnews.org and PICK SOMETHING INTERESTING instead…here let me show you how easy it is, from Dailyrotation..
“The MP3 Player Is Dead, And With It Goes a Generation”, ohh here is an interesting one that would probably have a lot of comments “HP pleads guilty to bribery and is fined $108m”, on the hardware side how about “It’s official: Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage to support up to 10 GB files” or “Sandisk hits the half-terabyte milestone for SD cards” or if you want something with some sass how about “T-Mobile CEO on Sprint: ‘Put a fork in it. They’re done'”
The point is there is a wealth of articles out there where the article doesn’t read as slanted as Fauxnews or HuffyPo because the author has to pull a bunch of conjecture out of their behinds. It like how you’ll see one of these articles where the writer is such a fanboi for Linux they squee when RMS says what he had for breakfast that takes ANY positive, no matter how slight, to use as a “basis” for his lame “Windows is dead Linux rules” bullshit…does the evidence support this? Hell does the evidence presented provide a basis for ANY conclusions? The answer is a big giant NOPE but because the fanboy has a bad case of the “is ought fallacy” they immediately jump to a conclusion at the slightest positive news.
All the “evidence” here shows is that the SCOTUS didn’t like these particular patents, that’s it, that is all it shows. If this fact isn’t interesting enough for an article? As I just showed it takes less than 10 seconds to come up with a better one, so don’t go fanboy and make an article that is 80% opinion, mmmkay?
We didn’t realize OSNews was the only tech news on the internet, and ALSO the only source of original tech articles. We must be on different internets (or parallel universes) where OSNews links to other news sites, other news sites exists, where the variety happens and we can choose to go there.
Your point is good (although it’s a bit sassily delivered). Actually, that’s what I like about OSNews: it does repost a lot of links to other websites. I don’t really want to go to those other sites; OSNews takes the firehose and reduces it to a manageable trickle. It’s like a Reader’s Digets of computery news.
And we seem to be largely comment-tired about the topic…
They invalidated 10 full software patents? Wow! In the mean time they granted what, 1000 more? Looks like they are fighting the good Don Quixote fight. It’s a drop in the ocean. Let’s be real, they’ve being granting software patents since 30 years or so and we’ve been fighting them since the las 29 years. Recently there’s been more press around them and they are trying to please the plebe, but the system remain unaffected. Nothing can stop it now, short of another world war. Nothing will improve until the next revolution.
The “they” in the two sentences is not the same. Also, I believe that the rulings of the first “they” might (should!) sooner or later influence the decisions of the second “they”.
You are right, but I cannot help but feel optimistic at this point. These are the first “real” drops.
Except the precedent that may be set in those invalidations may make it easier to invalidate new ones as they come along, or gain enough momentum to change the process.
Well, this precedent doesn’t just pave the path for other legal rulings, which, I admit, would take forever to clean out all the stupid patents. The article says that it’ll also make patent trolls very nervous about trying to defend their patents if they’ll just end up being invalidated so easily in court. And that’s almost as good, in practical terms.
Edited 2014-09-15 16:09 UTC