End Software Patents: News

Below is the court’s opinion, as text. For analysis, go to Bilski: analysis of Supreme Court decision.

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Here it is: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf

ESP is collecting third-party analyses and we’re working on our own analysis here: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski:_analysis_of_Supreme_Court_decision.

Scotusblog.com has some details. Justice Kennedy wrote the court’s opinion. For anyone who can’t connect, here are their live-blog posts:

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Everyone expects the US Supreme Court to publish their decision on the "Bilski" case today (June 28^th 2010). The court has to decide on the validity of a patent on a business method, but that’s not the main issue. Everyone expects that patent to be rejected, but the main issue is that to reject a patent the court must give a general test and explain why this patent fails that test. We want to know if they’ll propose a test which will also be failed by some or all software patents.

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No Bilski today. The only date left on the calendar for announcing decisions is Monday June 28^th. The court confirmed today that Monday will be the last day for announcing decisions, so either we get Bilski then, or there’s a very remote possibility that they will hold Bilski until the new term after the Summer. Background on this case can be found at en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski v. Kappos.

NZICT (who’s NZICT?) reports that they convinced the politician in charge of the Patents Bill, Hon Simon Power, to do a u-turn and open the floodgates for software patents. The report was posted on a patent lawyer’s blog, then deleted, but copies have been mirrored:

• Screenshot of Google’s cached copy and a copy of the text on nzoss.org.nz

More details below. People in NZ will have to work on this to prevent a catastrophe.

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Once again, after a tense morning, the opinions for the day are all announced and there’s still no Bilski. The remaining opinion dates are Thursday June 24^th (announced last Friday) and Monday the 28^th. For anyone new to the case, the background is described at en.swpat.org/wiki/Bilski_v._Kappos_(2010,_USA).

Below is the text, and links to machine translations to English, of the recent German court ruling “X ZR 27/07″.

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The tension mounts. The additional session announced by the court is now over, and there’s still no Bilski. The two remaining days on the court’s calendar for opinions this term are June 21^st and 28^th. (For background about the case, see en.swpat.org: Bilski v. Kappos)

June 14^th’s opinions have been published, and Bilski’s not there. The SCOTUSblog folk at the court also confirm there’s no Bilski decision. The court has announced that they will additionally publish opinions this Thursday. The possibility of delaying the decision until the next term is very unlikely as Chief Justice Roberts said at a conference last week that Bilski will “almost certainly be issued on one of the next three Mondays – June 14, 21, or 28.” Since June 14^th is now passed, and the 17^th has been added, that makes three possible days for announcing Bilski: June 17^th, 21^st and 28^th.

Venture capitalist Brad Feld has mailed a copy of Patent Absurdity to 200 policy setters in the USA (see Who should see Patent Absurdity?). The 200 are influential people in companies, standards groups, academia, and the relevent political committees.

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CSIRO is an organisation that holds a patent on wifi. They’ve already sued twenty companies and have said that they want royalties from “the entire industry”. If this includes software developers, then we have a problem. Can anyone help analyse if their patent is a software patent or a hardware patent? Thanks in advance.

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