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Supreme Court Overturns Festo Decision
An anonymous submitter wrote: "On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Festo v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki upholding the patent law "doctrine of equivalents" which says that patents cover insubstantial variations of a claimed invention. Previously, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit had ruled that the doctrine of equivalents did not apply where the patentee had made ANY changes to his claims during the application process. This week, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that changes made during the application process must be examined individually to see whether they gave up coverage of a particular accused device." Another submitter sent in this good analysis of the decision. Patents are a boring subject, but in general: the Appeals Court's decision in this particular case would have had the effect of making nearly all patents less broad and more specific. The Supreme Court noted the business disruption this would cause, and they are undoubtedly correct about that, but I can't help feeling that our legal system just missed an opportunity to reign in patent abuse.
How can the Supreme Court influence the Japanese?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The goal of *any* court should be to answer the question "if this goes all the way to the supreme court, what would be the ruling?". Courts should lose brownie points each time their decision is overturned.
The appeals court basically said that if you modify your patent at all during the approval process, you can't ever apply it to inventions similar to but not identical to what your patent describes. (It prevented the patent holder from making the argument at all: you modify the patent during approval and it WILL be very narrowly viewed.)
:)
The supreme court said we're not going to prevent you from making the argument that something similar to your patent is covered by the patent, but it moved the burden of proof to the patent holder rather than the challenger.
I.E If a patenter modifies the patent application during the approval process, the burden of proof falls on the patent holder, not on the infringer, to prove the modification didn't screw up the patent's enforceability (expanding an in-progress patent application to cover newly published prior art, etc).
Putting the burden of proof on the patent holder to prove their patent is valid is definitely a good thing.
From the article:
>The burden now falls upon the inventor to prove
>that the equivalent in question was not waived
>during prosecution.
see this excellent article on patent Risk-Reward-Facts.
Litigation costs:
- patent suits filed in 2000 generate roughly $4.2 BILLION before resolved
-> a patentee's overall chance of success in litifation is about 49%
- in year 2000, 2486 patent suits were filed -> average cost per suit: amazing $1.7 million.
Counting your chance of winning is around 50%, you can value your risk at $3.4 million. You must know that your patent is worth more than this before even thinking about defending your patent.
NOW, think again if patents are useful. They are useful for ONLY those with huge cash reserves. Now we declare the only winners: attorneys and multinational companies. Enuff said.
I tried to post this sometime ago, but it got rejected, so:
Google has this patent:
United States Patent 6,278,992
Search engine using indexing method for storing and retrieving data
I believe this patent might be one of the best examples of good software patents: it is detailed enough to define the innovation to be patented. It is good reading for anyone interested in creating effective indexes, the text and images of the patent is better reading than many of the books on the subject.
The closest that we've come in recent years to Congress actually approving a Consitituional Amendment to overrule the Supreme Court was an attempt to outlaw the burning of the American flag.
Given that sillyness, it's probably not a bad thing that the courts have an undue amount of authority in such matters.