Craig's Musings

The Supreme Court passed down a ruling yesterday calling for a change in the obviousness test for patents. It took a squabble over gas pedal design of all things, but the bell just tolled the beginning of the end of these nonsense software patents that have made me crazy all the years I have worked in the industry. Oh, sure, some people are all bug-eyed and freaked out because the Supreme Court didn't dictate the exact wording of how the obviousness test should change, but that wasn't their job - their job was just to say "it's busted, you idiots, go fix it." Which they did!

My favorite quotes from the ruling:

• "Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress and may, in the case of patents combining previously known elements, deprive prior inventions of their value or utility"
• "It is common sense that familiar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and a person of ordinary skill often will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle"
• "When there is a design need or market pressure to solve a problem and there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill in the art has good reason to pursue the known options within his or her technical grasp. If this leads to the anticipated success, it is likely the product not of innovation but of ordinary skill and common sense."
• "Rigid preventative rules that deny recourse to common sense are neither necessary under, nor consistent with, this Court's case law."
• "We build and create by bringing to the tangible and palpable reality around us new works based on instinct, simple logic, ordinary inferences, extraordinary ideas, and sometimes even genius. These advances, once part of our shared knowledge, define a new threshold from which innovation starts once more. And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts." AMEN!