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Court Puts Further Limits on Software Patents
An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a recent court ruling that may severely limit the scope of both software and business model patents. The court found that 'The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention' isn't enough to get over the 'non-obvious' hurdle that every patent is supposed to clear. This is a huge step in the right direction and one of the first admissions from the court system that perhaps software and business model patents have gone too far. 'In August, the Federal Circuit in essence raised the bar for proving willful infringement, a finding that allows a judge to triple a damage award. In April, the Supreme Court handed down a patent decision making it easier for trial-court judges to call an invention "obvious" and therefore ineligible for a patent.'"
Taking two devices to make an improved, or different device is perfectly valid.
The internet is not a device.
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The test-case in the article was completely uninteresting to most of us. It was a further comment in the ruling that is "the routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention"
What this really is saying is...
If an idea isn't patentable on it's own, then simply doing it with a computer isn't enough to make it patentable.
So if an idea such as "Tell something to somebody using piglatin" isn't patentable, then "Tell something to somebody using piglatin on a computer" or "Tell something to somebody using piglatin on a PDA" is not patentable either.
It could really limit the "dumb" patents.
Yeah and who will be liable for RIM and NTP losses. To me it looks like the USPTO acted fraudulently in taking money to grant such a patent. I hope NTP legal advisers also have good liability insurance.
What's the difference between the USPTO selling void patents and a conman selling famous landmarks? Is it a case on caveat emptor or would the con artist be prosecuted?
Let them get the patent before implementing the idea, but don't let them enforce it until they've implemented it (if it really was an original idea, they should be able to implement it quickly enough to enforce it, right?)
Technically NTP's patents are not for sending wireless email... rather, the patents are more about the "push" technology that is used.
How is their patented "push technology" different from, say, someone with a linux based phone running a stock mail transfer agent (such as sendmail or its successors) on the phone, with his ISP's MTA programmed to forward his mail to his own MTA in the normal fashion, and BIFF (or one of its successors) set up to beep at him when new mail arrives? This is a straightforward configuration of standard components. If you want to be able to read your email when out of range of the cell network it's the obvious way to configure it. No "invention" required.
I have a site, for instance, that receives mail by periodic polling of the ISP using UUCP-over-IP with dialup UUCP backup. If I were to move it to a linux phone - or clone the configuration - and switch the initiation of scheduled UUCP polling from my side to the ISP's side, I'd have one form of what I described in the paragraph above. It would be a typical mail configuration from the earliest days of UUCP-internet mail bridging. The sole change would be that the user's terminal happens to be a cellphone and the dialup polling happens to be by "radio phone" rather than landline.
Similarly if the cloned configuration accepted mail forwarded via SMTP, with the ISP's mail servers as some of the MX record entries (or the only ones), so inbound mail has somewhere to go when the phone itself isn't present on the net.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way