Red Hat Assistant General Counsel Analyses Supreme Court's Patent Ruling 43
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."
finally (Score:2, Insightful)
One step in the right direction!
Re:Patent the invention (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, despite the tech press's focus on the impact on software patents, imo this is really a case about business-method patents, and that's where it'll have the main impact. The test case in the decision is about someone who tried to patent the idea of intermediated financial settlement, by essentially adding the words "on a computer" to it. The court more or less just clarified that: 1) the basic idea of settling contracts through an intermediary is not patentable; and 2) merely doing it on a computer does not transform the nonpatentable idea into a "machine for intermediated financial settlement" that constitutes an invention.
What the court didn't comment on in this case is whether a patent making specific software-implementation claims would be valid. Their problem with this patent was precisely that it didn't claim any specific technical implementation as constituting the invention, only the really general idea of "this method... on a computer".