Supreme Court Ruling Could Invalidate Patents
In a yesterday blog I spoke about Microsoft’s potential lawsuits against the Linux Software Foundation for patent infringements. Hugo Ahlquist commented on the blog and the ramifications to such lawsuits could lead to “Patent Armageddon unleashed by IBM to having many or all the patents invalidated as obvious under the recent SCOTUS decision.”
Interestingly, I didn’t know about the recent SCOTUS decisions on the ruling of invalidating patents. Invalidating patents opens a whole new can of worms. The article by Chris Murphy on May 2, 2007 title Supreme Court ruling fallout: fewer patents, more litigation? points out the Supreme Court’s ruling that granted patents are only presumptions and can be contested at any time, consequently, invalidating the patent or reducing the efficacy and strength of the patent.
He continues to explain in the article that prior art which, as defined in Wikipedia and according to patent law, “constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality,” is the basis of judgement upon which patent officials rely when deciding the fate of an invention’s grant if it’s deemed to be non-obvious or sufficiently inventive for a patent. When new prior art is introduced in court proceedings which the original patent examiners hadn’t considered could lead to consequential diminishment of presumptive patent validity. Almost invariably some prior art had not been considered; thus, this results in companies who are accused of infringement to contest the patent’s validity to forego payment of license fees or any sort of settlements. This argument clearly depreciates the value of a patent’s validity.
Another such article on the Vonage vs. Verizon’s patent claims is addressed here Vonage Appeal Cites Supreme Court Patent Ruling. The Vonage argument rested on SCOTUS’ ruling of KSR International vs. Teleflex. The crux of the matter for the Supreme Court is the determination of the obviousness of a patent. The Supreme Court decided that courts should consider whether the declared invention is a resultant use of present components or elements or even the predictability of present components or elements.
Caron Carlson of Network World cites the example of whether at the time of invention knowledge of an obvious resolution existed to a known problem. If so this could lead to patent invalidity rulings. I believe such litigious cases on such as high level as SCOTUS undermines patent registration efficacy and makes me ponder on the its frail foundation.
Microsoft may have an extremely difficult time with these recent judgments by SCOTUS to win and argue for their patent infringement claims whether the defendants be Red Hat Linux, the Linux Foundation or IBM. This ruling could lead one to think that judges in the Supreme Court have a partial disposition for open-source software initiatives as I believe almost all code does and can have prior art arguments.
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