Subtle Change in Patent Case Law

An Anonymous Coward sends us this: "A friend sent me this link on Yahoo to a somewhat obscure court ruling which may have important consequences for patents, reverse engineering, and the like. I'm not a lawyer so I can't really assess the full impact of this ruling, but my friend (who is a law student) claims that it is a fairly big deal in the intellectual property realm." The article does a good job of explaining.