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Supreme Court Weakens Patents
ajakk writes "The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion, overturned the decades old test for determine whether a patent is obvious. The Court ruled that the Court had looked at obviousness in a "narrow, rigid manner." This should allow patents to be more easily invalidated because they are obvious."
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-10 56.pdf
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/04-13 50.pdf
Isn't this exactly what we wanted to happen? What kind of repurcussions is this going to have on patent-crazy companies like Microsoft?
... Microsoft was actually the appellant in this case -- the losing party who pushed the case to the USSC, and just won -- they were fighting AT&T, who claimed that U.S. patents basically could be enforced extraterritorially.
This is one of the reasons why it's good to RTFA
The whole issue was whether Microsoft, a U.S. corporation, was responsible for violating AT&T's U.S. patents (which are not, by and large, enforceable elsewhere, for instance in Europe and Asia -- there's no patent equivalent to the Berne Convention on copyright, really) if they only ever violated them in places where AT&T's patents didn't apply (outside the U.S.).
So if Microsoft went and sold AT&T-patent-encumbered software, but only in Europe, AT&T wanted to sue them for patent infringement here in the U.S. This was obviously a Bad Thing, and would have been a major expansion of patentholder's rights.
The WSJ article about it today was pretty good. (I think that link should work, since it has the "googlenews_wsj" in the URL to bypass their 'Free Preview' bullshit.)
So in this case, Microsoft was actually the good guy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The major tech companies wanted the patent reform--they tend to be victims of spurious patent cases. Microsoft, CISCO, Intel, Etc... (And Time Warner) are more concerned about protecting themselves from being sued by a patent squatter than they are about most of their own patents. Also, this lets them hijack other people's ideas more easily.
The major drug companies didn't want the reform, because patents are their life blood. It will get harder for them to patent obvious changes to medicine, such as combining multiple medications in one pill. (Though in some cases they'd still get away with it, I'd imagine, if they can demonstrate that there's some kind of real innovation going on in the time-delay mechanism or something. Or at least they'll argue that...)
"I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't ex post facto prevent this from being used to overturn patents already in place? Or does that only apply to congressional law?"
No. In a highly technical sense, ex post facto laws as used in the U.S. constitution refer only to laws that affect criminal punishment, either by increasing the punishment for a crime or defining a new crime. There is no per se constitutional prohibition against ex post civil laws, although some retroactive laws might violate due process.
In a more general sense, the court has not changed the law - the Federal Claims interpretation was always subject to alteration by SCOTUS. In essence, the decision today says that this is what the law has always said, and so is not a change at all.
It seems that this question was answered, but only with examples in the MPEP which is more legal-speak, and because you "don't have enough background knowledge" I'll put it into plain english for you
Essentially when rejecting a patent application an examiner could combine two different peices of prior art in the form of patents, PGPubs, Non-patent literature, etc. to come up with a rejection. In order to properly combine these pieces of art properly the examiner had to show exactly why it would be obvious (and generally site prior art for such a motivation) instead of being able to say "yeah... duh!" which gave a lot of loopholes for attorneys saying "you didn't give proper motivation" when the examiner would put a motivation in his own words.
The change now puts the burden into the attorney's hands to show why a motivation would be improper and giving evidence that the improvement really never had been thought of before. This will make rejection easier for examiners.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.