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Judge Invalidates Software Patent, Citing Bilski

bfwebster writes "US District Court Judge Andrew Gilford (Central District of California) granted a summary judgment motion in DealerTrack v. Huber et al., finding DealerTrack's patent (US 7,181,427) — for an automated credit application processing system — invalid due to the recent In re Bilski court decision that requires a patent to either involve 'transformation' or 'a specific machine.' According to Judge Gilford's ruling, DealerTrack 'appears to concede that the claims of the '427 Patent do not meet the "transformation" prong of the Bilski test.' He then applied the 'specific machine' test and noted that, post-Bilski the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences has ruled several times that 'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.' Judge Gilford analyzes the claims of the '427 patent, notes that they state that the 'machine' involved could be a 'dumb terminal' and a 'personal computer,' and then concludes: 'None of the claims of the '427 Patent require the use of a "particular machine," and the patent is thus invalid under Bilski.' DealerTrack apparently plans to appeal the ruling. Interesting times ahead."

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  1. y0u phai1 i7, so go fuck yourself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Please forgive me, but I told you so. I predicted long ago that Aristophrenia would introduce a zeitgeist of adversarialism to our society. Now that he has, I'd like to express my thoughts on the matter. The rest of this letter is focused exclusively on Aristophrenia, not because I harbor any ill-will towards him but because the problem with him is not that he's directionless. It's that he wants to make higher education accessible only to those in the higher echelons of society.

    All Aristophrenia really wants is to hang onto the perks he's getting from the system. That's all he really cares about. While he and other callow maggots sometimes differ on the details and scale of their upcoming campaigns of terror they never fail to agree on the basic principle and substance. Hence, it is imperative that you understand that Aristophrenia's co-conspirators' thinking is fenced in by many constraints. Their minds are not free because they dare not be.

    Someone has been giving Aristophrenia's brain a very thorough washing and now Aristophrenia is trying to do the same to us. His scare tactics are not an abstract problem. They have very concrete, immediate, and unpleasant consequences. For instance, you may have noticed that he uses communism as a subtle poison to dry up the sound serum of morality on which this country used to thrive. But you don't know the half of it. For starters, if I may be so bold, Aristophrenia always looks the other way when one of his devotees gets it in his head to abet a resurgence of careless insurrectionism. Apparently, the principle laid down by Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois during the French Reign of Terror still holds true today: Tout est permis à quiconque agit dans le sens de la révolution.

    Aristophrenia apparently wants to use us to fulfill his petty mission, and deep down in our bones, we all know why. Did it ever occur to him that he, serving as judge, jury, and executioner, has decreed that we should abandon the institutionalized and revered concept of democracy? There is widespread agreement in asking that question but there is great disagreement in answering it. He arrogates to himself the right to publish blatantly inaniloquent rhetoric as "education" for children to learn in school. Yes, I could add that he chivvies shabby, inimical parasites to his side by convincing them that bad things "just happen" (i.e., they're not caused by Aristophrenia himself), but I wanted to keep my message simple and direct. I didn't want to distract you from the main thrust of my message, which is that Aristophrenia's ultimata are just an outcropping of his hatred of us. If, after hearing facts like that, you still believe that Aristophrenia's dissertations are good for the environment, human rights, and baby seals, then there is unequivocally no hope for you.

    To be fair, I realize that some people may have trouble reading this letter. Granted, not everyone knows what "heterochromatization" means, but it's nevertheless easy to understand that Aristophrenia has never been a big fan of freedom of speech. He supports pogroms on speech, thought, academic license, scientific perspective, journalistic integrity, and any other form of expression that gives people the freedom to state that Aristophrenia's trucklers think that Aristophrenia was chosen by God as the trustee of His wishes and desires. This is precisely the non-equation that Aristophrenia is trying to patch together. What he's missing, as usual, is that at this point in the letter I had planned to tell you that I still wish briefly to take a position on the question as to what extent his patsies amount to nothing more than maladroit wimps riding on the back of a social fungus attacking the body politic. However, one of my colleagues pointed out that Aristophrenia thrives on the victimization of others. Hence, I discarded the discourse I had previously prepared and substituted the following discussion in which I argue that he is undeniably up to something. I don't know exactly what, but whenever Aristophrenia annou