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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

Roy Schestowitz at TechRights reports

Further reinforcing the current trend, software patents' demise in the United States has just been ascertained again.

[...] The latest decision[PDF] [...] from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is eye-catching, but either it hasn't caught the eye of legal firms or they're just trying to ignore it, so we'll be covering it more than we usually cover such decisions.

[...] The ruling is very important because it serves to demonstrate a loss for patent trolls and for software patents (or patent trolls that use software patents, which is typical). The decision criticises patent trolling as well.

[...] So far, based on our research, only one press article has been published about this decision. It's titled "Here's Why Software Patents Are in Peril After the Intellectual Ventures Ruling".

The end may be in sight for software patents--which have long been highly controversial in the tech industry--in the wake of a remarkable appeals court ruling that described such patents as a "deadweight loss on the nation's economy" and a threat to the First Amendment's free speech protections.

The ruling, issued on Friday [September 30] by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, found that three patents asserted against anti-virus companies Symantec [...] and Trend Micro were invalid because they did not describe a patentable invention. The patents were owned by Intellectual Ventures, which has a notorious reputation in the tech world as a so-called "patent troll", a phrase that describes firms that buy up old patents and wage lawsuits in order to demand payments from productive companies.

Software Patents as a Threat to Free Speech

Friday's ruling is also significant because Judge [Haldane Robert] Mayer eschews the insider baseball language that typically dominates patent law, and addresses patents in the broader context of technology and government monopolies.

Pointing out that intellectual property monopolies can limit free speech, Mayer notes that copyright law has built-in First Amendment protections such as "fair use" and that patent law must include similar safeguards. He suggests that the safeguard comes in the form of a part of the Patent Act, known as "Section 101", which says some things--including abstract ideas--simply can't be patented in the first place.


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday October 04 2016, @10:05PM

    by sjames (2882) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @10:05PM (#410369) Journal

    There do exist patents in cryptography for much the same reason some guy in Australia managed to patent the wheel. Or if you prefer, the guy who patented teasing a cat with a laser pointer. But note how few there are and that they are all expired.

    The pull tab patent is actually for the method of cheaply and reliably mass manufacturing the pull tab can tops. It may or may not have been worth a patent, but it very probably did involve a great deal more in time and materials to reduce it to practice than page rank.

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