US Supreme Court to preside over software patents case The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a patent case which some hope will have a profound effect on the software industry. The top US court on Friday said that it would review a lower court ruling in the case of Alice vs CLS Bank. The decision, say advocates, could have implications throughout the software industry. At issue …
It's an Australian business methods non-practicing entity, founded by a patent troll called Ian Shepherd, who presumably named the company after Alice Springs.
Apart from the revenue he generates through extortion, he's also funded by his "partner", the National Australia Bank, which I assume is allowed to practice his "inventions" royalty-free.
""Alice Corp"
WTF is "Alice Corp"?"
I can't be the only one to get the reference! (NSFW due to swearies)
Five favor whatever approach yields greatest benefit to BigCorps; four plead for rules to tame wild west patent scene. Expect a possible twist that claiming to hold patents is sufficient proof, re: MicroSoft bag of 245 patents never revealed but brutally effective in suppression. Love to see the rationalization for that one. "First to claim" becomes backbone of "Possession is nine-tenths", etc.
Never, ever expect a rational, predictable judgment from them Supremes. They've opened Pandora's box before; they'll do it again just for fun. Think not? Then were did "ca$h is free speech" and "corporations are people" come from? Bwahahahaha! Dem Supremes!
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise fhereof; or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
A corporation is a usually peaceable organization and most of "the press" is corporations. Crossroads GPS is not materially different from much of what we think of as the press, and probably presents a view slanted to more or less the same degree, although in a quite different direction, as Mother Jones or Glenn Greenwald. A plain reading of the First Amendment suggests that any legal restriction whatever on political reporting or advocacy, including campaign expenditures and lobbying, is at best highly suspect, and quite possibly a violation of someone's constitutional rights.
The origination of corporate personhood originated as a corporation conducting contracts and business as an individual, rather than as dozens of employees and management.
That was accepted as true for as long as the US has existed and tried initially in 1819, with later SCOTUS decisions refining the terms of corporate personhood. Per Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania - 125 U.S. 181 (1888), the Court clearly affirmed the doctrine, holding, "Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution."
Regarding codified law, 1 U.S.C. §1 (United States Code), tates:
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise--
the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
Of concern now is Citizens United, where the SCOTUS decided that corporate free speech extended to campaign contributions, thereby selling elections to the highest bidding corporations.
"Under the designation of 'person' there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution."
Which is total nonsense, of course. There is no logical reason to say that a group of people is the same thing as another person. That's the sort of thing only a lawyer could say with a straight face.
> Another 5-4 decision
That is not obvious. The conservative majority will vote whichever way benefits big US companies the most, and it is possible that companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google may want patent trolls controlled.
So - it'll either be a unanimous decision to limit patent trolling, or a split 5-4 decision to NOT limit patent trolling, depending on what orders the conservative majority get from Big Business.
Its about time a simple rule was put in place, patent cases have to be heard in the state on which the company starting the complaint runs most of its business in that country. If it does not run any business itself in said country then the state should be randomly selected. This would get rid of selective state choice for good decisions going your way.
i lost all faith in the supremes when, in january of 2001, the shrub was inaugurated by means of the votes of five persons. my fears were reinforced by the citizens united decision which gave the electoral process to the highest bidder. (at last check, the rent on the White House is up to $250,000,000/year)
the roberts court is a joke. it is an unbelievably politically motivated group of five, usually in lockstep, and i only trust them to decide whichever way their masters decree. the four, usually, in the minority are best represented by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who has written some of the most scathing dissents ever backed up by facts and settled law.
i can hardly wait for the present court to be re-staffed by human beings with some compassion for the citizens so adversely affected by their decisions.
[as clarence darrow said, "I've never wished a man dead but i have read some obituaries with great pleasure."]
Pamela Samuelson wrote a useful short discussion of the case for CACM. Requires ACM membership (or equivalent, such as access to an institutional subscription).
Here's a precis; I take responsibility for errors.
The reason it's going to SCOTUS is that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) heard Alice's appeal en banc, i.e. before all 10 CAFC judges rather than a panel of three. That means they thought it was important and wanted to set precedent. But the CAFC judges were split, so precedent wasn't established.
Seven of the CAFC judges invalidated Alice's method and computer-media patent claims. A "method" claim is a series of steps for doing something; a "computer-media" (or "Beauregard") claim is basically for code embodied in a storage medium. (So while pre-computer patents generally boiled down to "you make a bunch of parts and put them together and it does this", computer-media claims are meant to be the software analogue: "you write a bunch of code and record it in a storage medium and it does this".) But two of those seven disagreed about why they were invalid, so there was a 5/2/3 split on that.
For Alice's systems ("a data-processing system comprising a data-storage unit and a processing unit...") claims, five of the ten thought they were sufficiently concrete to uphold, but the other five thought they were just restatements of the method claims. This is an important question on the "are these patent claims too general" front. So that was an even 5/5 split, which affirmed the lower court's decision to invalidate the patents but didn't set precedent.
Two judges thought the patents might be upheld if only some claims were invalidated. The other eight felt all the claims had to rise or fall together; of those eight, three would have upheld all the claims. So that's a 2/5/3 split on that question.
Samuelson also has a quick review of some relevant cases:
- Benson, 1972: SCOTUS affirmed that an algorithm for converting BCD to pure binary was not patentable
- Flook, 1979: SCOTUS affirmed that a software-implemented process for controlling manufacturing equipment (despite field-of-use restrictions that might have alleviated some of the concerns they expressed in Benson)
- Diehr, 1981: SCOTUS allowed (in a 5-4 decision) a patent for a process that used a computer program; Samuelson identifies this as the decision that led CAFC to start upholding software patents
- Bilski, 2010: SCOTUS ruled that a price-hedging method was not patentable, because it was too abstract
Samuelson says that Bilski (and the PTO's initial decision to deny Bilski a patent) began to tighten the patent regime again and move back toward the status established by Benson, but SCOTUS did not provide a test for the "too abstract" restriction.
Apparently SCOTUS' reasoning for the "too abstract" restriction is that such a patent could preemptively apply to innovative approaches invented after the patent is issued.
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