20 Jan 2005
Google, Cisco fail to win patent reform bid

Get this:

The justices on Tuesday refused to hear a hotly contested patent case involving drive shafts of "substantially uniform wall thickness" that pitted American Axle and Manufacturing against Dana Corp.

So they let a ruling from an appeals court stand, saying that "thickness" is a patentable attribute - despite the fact of different design and materials.

This has huge implications for software patents, because it basically allows the patenting of an effect, rather than an inventive cause. Intellectual property lawyers routinely target these so-called "copycat" patents. If my software does the same thing as your code, and your code is patented, I could be held liable for infringment even though the code is completely different! This really could kill the goose laying all those golden eggs in Silicin Valley: any programmer will tell you there's a nearly unlimited number of ways to code a sort (or anything else, for that matter), but all could be construed as illegal if some company managed to get a patent on "substantially uniform sorting parameters" or some other such baloney.

Companies couldn't convince Supreme Court to hear a case they argue is key to preserving a "balanced" patent system.

(link) [CNET News.com]

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