Patents Under Attack – Not By Microsoft, But By The U.S. Supreme Court
It is funny how sometimes we recall a issue, but don’t remember who or what company caused the issue in the first place, which than leads one to believe that it was a non-issue to begin with. Let me explain. I remember that some company was going to sue everyone because it contended that it had a patent on clicking on a Web link to be brought to another site. I recall thinking to myself how ludicrous it was and how could anyone hold a patent on a click?
It seems that the U.S. Supreme Court is now looking at patents in a new way, that separates innovation from what they describe as ‘obvious.’ Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a unanimous court:
Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress and may, in the case of patents combining previously known elements, deprive prior inventions of their value or utility.
What is going to be interesting is how the court is going to view patents that may have been issued by the U.S. Patent Office that, itself, may have not understood what the patent was even for, or that may have been intimated by the company who was applying for the patent. No longer are designs as simple as say the paper clip, but now incorporate highly technical verbage and could be very hard to interpret except by an expert in the field. In other words, the U.S. Patent Office could be hoodwinked into believing that the patent application was in fact new, when in fact it was not. Or, as the court states, is ‘obvious.’
So what does all this mean? In my opinion I believe it is going to be extremely difficult to for any company, no matter how big it is, to be able to prove that the patent it has was not ‘obvious’ and therefore should have been granted a patent in the first place. I also believe that just because a patent may have been issued, that the U.S. Patent Office could have erred in granting the patent not realizing that the patent requested was in fact ‘obvious.’
Just my two cents. What do you think? Are companies such as Microsoft going to have a difficult time in the future trying to defend patents that the courts may view as ‘obvious?’ Are their alleged innovations going to hold up under microscopic analysis?
Comments welcome.
[tags]patents, microsoft, supreme court, obvious[/tags]
