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Uniloc Patent Case Against Rackspace Tossed for Bogus Patents

Posted by Unknown on from the don't-mess-with-red-hat dept.

netbuzz writes "A federal judge in Texas, presiding over a district notorious for favoring patent trolls, has summarily dismissed all claims relating to a case brought by Uniloc USA against Rackspace for [Linux] allegedly infringing upon [Uniloc's] patents. Red Hat defended Rackspace in the matter and issued a press release saying: 'In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.'" You can't patent floating point math after all.

1 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Groklaw summary... by Theaetetus · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    ... available here has more details and quotes from the decision, but is predictably bad on analysis. In particular, in spite of PJ's bluster about how this wasn't "new, novel, non-obvious" and it's "unbelievable" that the USPTO would allow the claim, the decision had nothing to do with novelty or nonobviousness. Rather, the decision was strictly on patent eligibility under 35 USC 101, relying on the Supreme Court's Bilski decision: merely abstract ideas, not tied to a machine or transformative of matter, are unpatentable subject matter and exempt from the patent act, regardless of how new they are.

    In other words, you could have the most novel and nonobvious algorithm in the entire world, and the USPTO could literally spend the entire GDP of the United States searching for prior art and interviewing every engineer, mathematician, and programmer in the world, to be told unanimously that this was a literally once-in-a-lifetime idea with not even a hint of relevant prior art out there, and it still would be unpatentable if it were just an algorithm. You could invent the mathematics that allow time travel or teleportation, winning the Nobel prize for your utter genius, and nonetheless, if it's just the math, it's not patent eligible.

    So, this has nothing to do with novelty or obviousness, and, since the Bilski decision came out long after this patent was issued, there's nothing unbelievable about the USPTO thinking it was patent eligible. That was the state of the law back then. It's a good thing it's changed, but that doesn't mean that anything done prior to that change is an unbelievable departure from common sense.