>We will work to ensure the Federal Circuit—the court that hears all patent appeals—diligently applies the new filter on patentability.<p>Doesn't the Federal Circuit have something of a history on cases such as this, where they essentially say 'fuck it, we're not listening to the SCOTUS', and continue to rule as they please? What's to stop them from just doing business as usual in defiance of the Supreme Court?
> the Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely adding “a generic computer to perform generic computer functions” does not make an otherwise abstract idea patentable. This statement (and the opinion itself) makes clear that an abstract idea along with a computer doing what a computer normally does is not something our patent system was designed to protect.<p>This opinion gives me hope that reform is possible & that the U.S. government still works with reason.<p>Now the question is are patents still relevant in today's world of internet, rapidly accelerating innovation, and evidence that free/open source research reduces costs?
This is about the same thing that's already on the front page with 70 comments, including a great one by grellas. I'd go there if you're interested in this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160</a>
This is great ammo for all the jack-wagons I encounter in daily life who counter my position on patents with the genius position, "What if someone came and just took your house, or your car away. That's your property and you wouldn't like it, would you?"
while the decision is pretty tightly tailored, it seems like it's SCOTUS' way of opening the door for subsequent arguments regarding pure software patents. take google's page rank patent[1]. one could argue that assigning scores to, say, academic papers based on references cited and then doing that repeatedly is an "abstract idea" and google's recitation of "apply[ing] it" using a computer is not enough to enter into patent eligible subject matter. if you read/listen to the oral argument, the counter argument that doing so on a massive scale is impracticable was flatly rejected. indeed, a million monkeys counting the citations of scholarly pubs could probably perform that method on a decent sized corpus. is the method therefore inherently abstract? will be interesting to see if Alice alters the analysis (albeit slightly) for these types of questions and whether we'll see a pure software issue (without the negative financial/business method clouds in the background) sooner rather than later.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999</a>
What exactly is an abstract idea? Is it possible for an idea to be concrete?<p>From looking at examples, "abstract" seems to mean trivial. By trivial, I don't mean obvious or silly, I mean small; i.e. an idea that can be reduced to one or two sentences, like "e-commerce shopping cart."<p>Otherwise it's pretty hard to distinguish ideas about software from ideas about hardware and explain why one is more patentable than the other.
My favorite part about this is that it shows how idiotic USPTO is for approving such patents in the first place. Hopefully, this will make them reconsider whether they should be approving other types of patents, too, before the Supreme Court puts them in a bad light again, but I'm not holding my breath.
"Admittedly, the Supreme Court did not offer the clearest guidance on when a patent claims merely an abstract idea, but it did offer guidance that should help to invalidate some of the more egregious software patents out there." Where can i find this guidance?