Supreme Court Throws Out Bilski Patent

ciaran_o_riordan writes "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF). We've known that Bilski's patent would get thrown out; that was clear from the open mockery from the judges during last November's hearing. The big question is, since rejecting a particular patent requires providing a general test and explaining why this patent fails that test, how broad will their test be? Will it try to kill the plague of software patents? And is their test designed well enough to stand up to the army of patent lawyers who'll be making a science (and a career) of minimizing and circumventing it? The judges have created a new test, so this will take some reading before any degree of victory can be declared. The important part is pages 5-16 of the PDF, which is the majority opinion. The End Software Patents campaign is already analyzing the decision, and collecting other analyses. Some background is available at Late-comers guide: What is Bilski anyway?" More analysis of the decision is available at Patently-O.

Comments

Re:"journalism"

[arkane1234]

No, reading an article that talks about something vague, and doesn't give a hint on what it is.

If I wanted to google it, I would have googled it instead of reading the article, almighty oracle.

Re:"journalism"

[MrNemesis]

I read slashdot every working weekday (and have done since 2001) and I don't remember seeing anything called "Bilski" in recent memory.

And sentences like "X could have major repercussions for Y" where X is an unknown quantity and Y is an article about which one can be reasonably sure someone would know don't tend to work very well when pointed at the scientific market - doubly so when you can't tell when X is a proper noun or not. Observe the following examples:

"Moojops to be a major player in the fashion wars this summer!"
"Cocktuffington takes Hollywood starlets by storm!"
"Franzibald levels in the Large Hadron Collider CERN team reaching critical levels!"

I daresay the first two might make sense to someone who gives a shit, but I for one think the first sentence of the summary would be better written as "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF), more commonly known as the busines's model patent." Eight extra words and also the extra chance for adding a superfluous apostrophe, a whole lot less kerfuffle. It's common courtesy, not to mention fucking basic journalism, to explain or not obfuscate your terms.

"Interested in a popular search company's competing motive image compression algorithm? Well, in the preceding diurnal cycles the collective of sentient carbon-based non-abhumanoid lifeforms who promulgate behind the hypertext-based site registered at D5908ABA progressed with envisaging a manifestation of the extrapolated logic required to implement a playback-oriented interpreter of aforementioned format which when committed to an unspecified base2 arithmetic engine format required more than pi to the power 6 (but less than the distance from Shrewsbury to Telford when measured in the length of a certain heroic greeks sub-ankle extremity) typewriter dings within the confines of the specified format."

Damn. I should write for Gartner. Or Idle.

Re:"journalism"

[mdielmann]

If that were the case, why not just say "Supreme Court Hands Down a Decision". After all, what they're deciding on has no relevance at all...
All I've been able to infer is it's a business-process patent, appears to be excessively vague, and may or may not have some relevance to software patents, depending on which armchair quarterback you listen to. Note that the summary only mentions the software portion indirectly, and the other issues at hand not at all.