Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
SCOTUSblog explains the excellent unanimous decision in KSR v. Teleflex. The Court overturned a lower court and invalidated a patent, strongly reaffirming the principle that patents must cover inventions that would not be obvious to a practitioner in the field based on existing inventions ("prior art"):
The Court’s decision has therefore called into question the validity of hundreds of thousands of claims in issued patents, and will likely lead to a dramatic change to the method by which the Patent Office, the courts, and the bar conduct their obviousness analyses.This is excellent news, since the Patent Office has been on a tear lately, granting patents for a wider array of things, including business practices and algorithms, while staff sizes have held relatively steady, and patent reviewer expertise has not grown to match the state of the art. Fear of tripping over a questionable patent, or running afoul of a bogus patent held only for the purpose of extorting license fees, has hampered technological advancement, operating exactly counter to the intention of patents.
Patents are supposed to "promote the useful arts and sciences" by granting a limited period of monopoly over an invention. Overly broad patents and patents on obvious inventions (including business practices and computer algorithms) have left a field so convoluted as to be impossible for the average innovator to navigate.
This decision is a good first step. SCOTUSblog describes a lot of ambiguity left in the decision, ambiguity which will be sorted out by lower courts, but which will move us towards a more rational patent system.
Comments
Patents have become a ridiculous sideshow for software companies and is indicative of the problems with current patent law. Microsoft was granted a patent on the word "TODO" when software generates code that imbeds the word. This is a tiny slice of the moronic state of the patent industry. It is sad enough for MS to have filed and completely inane that the patent office granted it. 99.99% of all software solutions are obvious and while I see a need to protect proprietary algorithms like gif encoding, the other 99.99% of code patents should immediately be recinded. Trademarks protect the code anyway, so a patent is just a means to try to prevent competitors from adopting better ideas and grants a means for suit if a cease and desist fails. There are a million ways to encode a textbox or a toolbar and the idea is clearly obvious, so why the hell is the idea of a textbox or a toolbar patentable. If I write a program that prints "TODO" in an html page or source code, then MS can come and steal away my business. I am not even going to go into the ongoing ten year lawsuit by SCO against IBM.
Full disclosure, I hold MS stock, but the frivolous patent suits and filings really piss me off.
Posted by: James Taylor | May 1, 2007 4:53 PM
One other bit of dirt with regard to the "TODO" above is MS didn't even conceive of the idea, but they jumped on the patent. I have heard that MS patents anything they can either to prevent a competitor from doing so and likely using it against them or that they a gobbling up all the patents to demonstrate how ridiculous the whole affair is. I am not sure which is the case, but MS has certainly not helped by fueling the mad patent frenzy the software industry has been saddled with continuously for the last ten years. Our company had a rough spot when one of our vendors was sued by a programmer who held the patent on a core bit of their technology. It put the company in limbo for over a year and us as well as a result.
Posted by: James Taylor | May 1, 2007 5:00 PM
With GIFs, it's actually an issue of the LZW compression algorithm which GIFs happen to use. The pettiness over that patent made it easier for PNG to overtake GIF, which gave the story a happy ending, I suppose.
Hadn't heard about the TODO thing. That's awful, because it's such a common part of software development. Bizarre.
Posted by: Josh Rosenau | May 2, 2007 12:30 PM
Here's a link on the TODO business
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+checks+off+patent+win/2100-1008_3-5228693.html
Posted by: James Taylor | May 2, 2007 10:29 PM