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."

Comments

The whole opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-10 56.pdf

KSR INTERNATIONAL CO. v. TELEFLEX INC. ET AL.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/04-13 50.pdf

MS-bashing not quite appropriate here.

[Kadin2048]

Isn't this exactly what we wanted to happen? What kind of repurcussions is this going to have on patent-crazy companies like Microsoft?

This is one of the reasons why it's good to RTFA ... 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.

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.