Another patent just failed the Supreme Court's airy test for unpatentable "abstract ideas".
A whiter shade of pale
Patents that define ways to make money through commerce on the Internet never have gotten much respect.
In the last year, a series of rulings by the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court bled much of the remaining color out of the "business
Measuring patent damages — and excluding reexam evidence
The Federal Circuit again tightened the criteria for setting damages awards in patent infringement cases. But, in a bit of good news for infringement plaintiffs, it lent further support to the general inclination of district courts to exclude evidence of non-final results of patent reexaminations by the U.S. Patent
Abstract ideas
Section 101 of the Patent Act allows patents on "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof". 35 U.S.C. 101. But, the Supreme Court has held, it does not make laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas patentable. Ass'n for Molecular Pathology
Broad patents
You could get really rich if you had a patent on something like "a device that can make and receive wireless phone calls". That would cover every wireless phone, dumb and smart, that ever existed. It would include the satchel phone that Blawgletter's friend Darrell Gest carried around in his ratty pickup back
Patents require definiteness
The U.S. Supreme Court has tightened the test for whether a patent "particularly point[s] out and distinctly claim[s] the subject matter which the applicant regards as [the] invention." 35 U.S.C. § 112, ¶ 2.
The Federal Circuit (which handles all appeals from district courts on patent matters) had interpreted the statute to
The U.S. Supreme Court took a step today towards limiting patent infringement cases, at least ones involving "method" patents (i.e., ones that describe a process rather than a device, design, or other patentable subject matter).
Kinds of infringement
Patent infringement may take different forms:
How not to defer.
Last month, Blawgletter pointed out that the Supreme Court had granted review in a case that may curb the Federal Circuit. We noted:
A rule that has applied in patent cases since 1998 may go the way of Chevy Cobalt ignition switches.
Boy, the Federal Circuit's sure lowered the boom on Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner in Apple Inc. v. Motorola, Inc., No. 12-1548 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 25, 2014).
Smartphone warfare.
The appeal dealt with Judge Posner's rulings as a trial court judge in the Northern District of Illinois phase of the titanic smartphone struggle between Apple and Motorola
A rule that has applied in patent cases since 1998 may go the way of Chevy Cobalt ignition switches.
"Deference, I Don't Have to Show You any Stinkin' Deference" riffed on a line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), in which Gold Hat, posing as a Mexican Federale, says
If you've handled a bunch of patent cases without running across the Kessler doctrine, don't feel like the Lone Ranger. Until today, IP wizards like you likely had little cause to know about the patent-claim-killing rule that sprang more than a century ago from Kessler v. Eldred, 206 U.S. 285 (1907). Be warned. It's