jeff wrote:
What does it all mean?
[re:
http://opensourcepimp.com/open_source_u_s_supreme_court_deals_a_blow_to_patent_trolls]
having the patent on a design or process means having the legal right to
exclude others from using it e.g. your company patents a way to build a car
engine that lets it run off of household dirt thus you have the legal right
to prevent other companies from producing and selling this type of engine
without paying you X amount of dollars for N years or you get to sue them.
The major stipulation for getting a patent is that the design or process
must be useful and unobvious.
Examples of current patent use would be
(A) a high tech R&D firm applying for many patents in a particular field
of production that it would be virtually impossible for anyone else to enter
this field in the future without infringing on their intellectual property,
(B) a startup patenting their new technology to appear more enticing to
a larger company that might consider acquiring them,
(c) a giant company patenting things so they could counter-sue companies
that might later try to sue them,
(d) some f***wit decides to patent something solely for the purpose of
suing people, thus making money working over the system, e.g. the company
that sued blackberry.
The problem with computer science and similar fields is that varying levels
of ability said fields affect the perception of obviousness, thus you have
Amazon actually being able to patent 1-click shopping, and Microsoft trying
to patent XML.
What this article says is that the court must now consider how much damage
the infringer of a patent is actually doing to the holder of the patent
(which in the case of aforementioned f***wits--patent trolls--is not
much...)
Nick
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