Displaying items by tag: Supreme Court

The Google-Oracle fight has been going on for a long time now and has had a few ups and downs in the course of the case. The original premise of the case is that Google was able to speed up development through the reuse of nine (9) lines of code that Oracle claims are protected by copyright. One judge agreed that this was absurd, but his decision was thrown out on appeal. Now, the Department of Justice is throwing their two cents into the mix at the request of the Supreme Court. Their commentary is quite interesting…

In a somewhat surprising decision the US Supreme Court has rules that patents that cover an “abstract idea” are not valid. This was the final outcome of a battle between two financial institutions, Alice Corp and CLS Bank. The story is one that has played out very often, Alice Corp. holds the patent for the concept of an electronic escrow system. CLS wants to use the same type of system, but as the patent held by Alice Corp is so vague and abstract they cannot do so without running the risk of infringing.

Patent laws and their effect on technology is something that we have we have followed over the years. We have watched as patent laws have gotten looser (changing from first to produce to first to file) and the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office) has approved some outrageous patents. The negative changes to the patent system have given rise to more and more lawsuits that do little to help the market and often directly hurt the consumer.