Supreme Court on Bilski - no but whatever..

[Dave Farber <dfarber () me com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Joly MacFie <joly () punkcast com>
> Date: June 28, 2010 12:43:29 PM EDT
> To: dave <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Supreme Court on Bilski - no but whatever..

> Hi Dave,
>
> The Supreme Court opinion in re:Bilski is in.  With typical ambivalence it upheld the federal court's decision while 
> rejecting it's reasoning, replacing the machine-or-transformation test with essentially no test at all. The Court 
> rejected the patent just because it was an "abstract idea". From the syllabus:
> The machine-or-transformation test is not the sole test for patent eligibility under §101. [A]lthough that test may 
> be a useful and important clue or investigative tool, it is not the sole test for deciding whether an invention is a 
> patent-eligible “process” under §101. In holding to the contrary, the Federal Circuit violated two principles of 
> statutory interpretation: Courts “‘should not read into the patent laws limitations and conditions which the 
> legislature has not expressed,’” Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U. S. 175, 182, and, “[u]nless otherwise defined, ‘words will 
> be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning,’” ibid. The Court is unaware of any ordinary, 
> contemporary, common meaning of “process” that would require it to be tied to a machine or the transformation of an 
> article.  
> . . .
> Because petitioners’ patent application can be rejected under the Court’s precedents on the unpatentability of 
> abstract ideas, the Court need not define further what constitutes a patentable “process,” beyond pointing to the 
> definition of that term provided in §100(b) and looking to the guideposts in Benson, Flook, and Diehr. Nothing in 
> today’s opinion should be read as endorsing the Federal Circuit’s past interpretations of §101.
>
> So this would seem to leave the whole question of software patents as wide open as ever.
>
> Opinion is at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
> WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
> http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
>  Secretary - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
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