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Red Hat Assistant General Counsel Analyses Supreme Court's Patent Ruling
ectoman (594315) writes The U.S. Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking decision concerning software patents, claiming that abstract ideas are not by themselves patentable. The ruling was a cause for celebration among those opposed to software patent abuse, like Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, Rob Tiller. Here, Tiller analyzes and offers some context for the Court's ruling, which "uses the traditional common law methodology of comparing one case to previous similar cases and harmonizing with those most similar."
As I read it, this says an invention is patentable - but implementing the invention on a computer doesn't necessarily add anything. That seems to be very good news for all those silly patents that only claim "on a computer" or "on the internet".
Is it really the end of all the ridiculous lawsuits between Apple, Google and Microsoft?
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If software patents were around back in the 80's then IBM would have patented the hell out of the PC and its BIOS. Only IBM would be making them to this day and they'd cost $5000 for a base model. Only major corporations and well heeled geeks would own them. The Internet would likely still be DarpaNet and I could go on and on. If anyone recollects, IBM's BIOS was reverse engineered, legally, as it was only copied by copyright, as is reasonable and proper. The people that read the code described it and people who had never seen the IBM code wrote their own code to behave similarly, again, all very reasonable and legal. The processor your code runs on is the invention. Your code is your art or writing that makes the processor sing. If I can make my code sing a similar song without copying yours then that's as should be. Code should be copyright-able as are words in a book. Just because you write a clever whodunit does not mean that no one can ever write another!
Your prediction might have been reasonable in 1972. Now, we know what did happen. IBM did in fact get over 50,000 patents, making them one of the top patent holders in the world. Yet, none of your postdictions was true.
Most certainly the patent office needs to train their examiners better in applying the law to the types of inventions they see today (and non-inventions). For example, the law says that a mechanism can be patented. It doesn't say that the result of that mechanism can be patented. It says it must be a new invention. As this case made clear, an old invention being done on a computer doesn't magically become a new invention. It's still an old invention. USPTO needs to train their people on that. Still, many of IBM's 50,000 patents are for new ways of doing things that happened to be done in software. Manufacturers of competing systems had to find new ways of doing those things, or license the patents.
"claiming that abstract ideas are not by themselves patentable"
No, that's not at all what SCOTUS said. SCOTUS said that the abstract ideas presented in the specific patents at issue were not patentable.