jducoeur: (Default)
jducoeur ([personal profile] jducoeur) wrote2006-11-28 02:38 pm
Entry tags:

The most important news stories are sometimes the least-covered

I just now came across this blog entry, talking about the fact that the Supreme Court is weighing a patent case with serious ramifications today. Apparently, it's being used as a test case for the question of what is "obvious", and they're seriously examining whether the current standards for patents (which have led to the enormous slew of patents in the past couple of decades) are really appropriate.

Neat stuff, and terribly, terribly relevant to the tech industry. For all the concerns that it will cause some chaos (which are probably true), I dearly hope that they wrestle with the problem seriously enough to come up with a better standard. We'll see what happens...

[identity profile] osewalrus.livejournal.com 2006-11-28 07:40 pm (UTC)(link)
It's been in trade press, but mainstream press generally don't cover such things until after argument or when the SCT issues an opinion. Only really huge things or maintsream issues get pre-game warm up.

[identity profile] herooftheage.livejournal.com 2006-11-28 07:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, but I would have thought this one was really huge. I see the results every day - my favorite example being Motorola having the rights to flip phones, even though it was obvious enough to have occurred to the writers of Star Trek in the 60s.

[identity profile] umbran.livejournal.com 2006-11-28 08:29 pm (UTC)(link)
It is huge, for businesses.

For the man on the street, who never directly interacts with patent law, it is all stuff that happens "behind the curtain" - a possible reshuffling on who has the rights to what, and maybe a resulting change of prices some years from now as things get sorted out. Not really a big deal.

[identity profile] herooftheage.livejournal.com 2006-11-28 09:06 pm (UTC)(link)
For me, the big deal is in a bunch of things I use where the features are all fractured across several competitors because each owns a different set of patents that seem pretty obvious. Sometimes these companies manage to license to each other, but just as often think of their little twist on the world as the thing that is going to sell the product, and so it becomes very hard to get an item that has everything I want in it.

[identity profile] umbran.livejournal.com 2006-11-29 02:12 pm (UTC)(link)
I lump that under "price changes some time in the future" - it becomes cheaper to get certain technologies because nobody has to pay a licensing fee.

Of course, that may all be lost under the cost of retesting patents to see if they meet more stringent guidelines, or the legal fees around challenging patents.

[identity profile] umbran.livejournal.com 2006-11-29 03:28 pm (UTC)(link)
True, but those are largely one-off fees, as the system adjusts to the new structure.

You're talking about a potential one-off fee for every patent filed in the last 20 years. Even if it only applies to a fraction of the total number of patents filed, the cumulative effect is likely to be considerable.

And that's not considering the fact that the patent office and courts are already overburdened - working through the tangle of change will be a major undertaking, with major costs to the nation. If that cost isn't paid, the system may slow to a crawl, and time is money.

Which is not to say it shouldn't be done. Any improvement in infrastructure has a cost. But we would be wise to not be dismissive of the effects, either.

[identity profile] be-well-lowell.livejournal.com 2006-11-29 12:27 am (UTC)(link)
"The Supreme Court agreed to think about it" isn't huge, no matter how important the topic. If they reach an opinion that makes major changes to the status quo (which would be great, even if it would likely make me change my resume), that would be huge.

[identity profile] goldsquare.livejournal.com 2006-11-28 08:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Check out ScotusBlog for some useful information on this, and all of the Supreme's Doings.

[identity profile] goldsquare.livejournal.com 2006-11-30 07:51 pm (UTC)(link)
This article is a very technical description of what actually happened, with more technical links.
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/scotusblog/758228.html