[RLUG] have you heard the good news?

[n a]

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

_________________________________________________________________
Don’t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/