US Supreme Court rules against software patents

Posted Jun 19, 2014 18:39 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: US Supreme Court rules against software patents

I suspect it took 10 seconds to reach this decision, and two months to come up with a ruling that didn't overtly insult the Federal Circuit for needing detailed instructions on something so obvious.

AFAICT, they don't rule on whether it would be possible for a patent on software to pass the test as stated, but the infamous software patents I can think of wouldn't be allowed. I think they've avoided ruling on whether their could be a patent that would arguably be a software patent but where this reasoning wouldn't apply. But it really looks like this ruling is pretty much a cut-and-paste template for ruling invalid any patent on a program for a general-purpose computer.

US Supreme Court rules against software patents

Posted Jun 20, 2014 1:02 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

As a general rule almost every court in the land knows how it's going to rule before anything is even submitted to them. They seek justification in their ruling for what they already decided. This is one of the first lessons they teach in lawschool, they assign the student lawyer an opinion and tell them to justify it using the existing law and rulings.

Scalia is renowned for this, he routinely quotes dictionaries from as far back as 1777 to justify some opinion's he's prepared in the effort to redefine the meanings of words because the law doesn't support what he wants to rule. Fortunately it finally appears we have a Justice (Kagen) that is going to challenge him on rewriting the definitions of words.