11 ms·

Abstract software patents struck down by Supreme Court

280 points by chaqke 12y ago

chc 12y ago
This is about the same thing that's already on the front page with 70 comments, including a great one by grellas. I'd go there if you're interested in this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160
- Zigurd 12y ago
  But now I'm looking at it on a mobile device. That's totally novel.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  That post was just a link to the actual Supreme Court decision. This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand, so I think it serves a useful purpose.
  - icambron 12y ago
    > This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand I really strongly disagree with this. Supreme Court decisions are usually quite readable and will give a you a nuanced overview of the legal background and justifications for the ruling. They're usually very accessible and not nearly as crammed with legal jargon as you might guess. I try to read as many important decisions as I can and I have no legal training at all. I only occasionally have to look up a term. I would say they're easier, on average, for me to read than a CS paper. And after reading a few Scotus papers, you'll have a much deeper understanding of how our legal system works, and of course a great deal more about the individual decisions. You'll even read news articles about a decision and say, "That's not what the decision was about at all!" Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long, and there's nothing wrong with a summary article like this one. But my point is that you shouldn't fear the legalese.
    - jallmann 12y ago
      > Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long Interestingly, judges such as Richard Posner think recent opinions are too long. http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-justices-should-cut-bs-from-opinions http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-justices-s... (Ignore the linkbait title; the article really is quite good.)
    - eoi 12y ago
      I would add that the court's opinions are typically prefaced with an excellent summary, which can be a solid alternative or supplement to an article.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand More accurately, this press release puts the spin of an interest group popular on HN on the decision; it is not a neutral explanation of the decision.
briantakita 12y ago
> the Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely adding “a generic computer to perform generic computer functions” does not make an otherwise abstract idea patentable. This statement (and the opinion itself) makes clear that an abstract idea along with a computer doing what a computer normally does is not something our patent system was designed to protect. This opinion gives me hope that reform is possible & that the U.S. government still works with reason. Now the question is are patents still relevant in today's world of internet, rapidly accelerating innovation, and evidence that free/open source research reduces costs?
- rayiner 12y ago
  Each generation of CPU design or gas turbine design or wireless baseband design, drug design, or nuclear power plant design still takes more R&D money than the last. And nobody was working on a competitive open source LTE baseband last I checked. "Accelerating innovation" is something which, if it exists, touches only a few areas of engineering. In most areas of engineering, innovation has gotten more expensive, not less. Very few things are amenable to a distributed group of hackers working on it. Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD's. And those cost lots of money. We can argue about how necessary patents ever were, but I don't think they're any less necessary today. The question, in my opinion, isn't whether patents are still relevant. Its whether we can draw lines better to leave out less useful ones while keeping that exception from swallowing the patent system. E.g. if a power control module for an LTE radio is patentable if implemented in an ASIC, should it become unpatentable when you implement it in a DSP? If not: how do you allow those patents while invalidating Amazon's One Click shopping patent? To a certain extent, its tempting to just say: "its too hard to draw the lines, its not worth the trouble." That's easy to say if you're not Qualcomm and don't have a dozen companies who'd love to use your work for free.
  - richardw 12y ago
    Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD's. And those cost lots of money. Possibly the wrong example for your argument :) Jet engines can now be designed by a team at SpaceX rather than at NASA, and the team can 3D-print them. That seems like reduced-cost innovation compared to decades past. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-makes-3-d-printing-history.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-m... (PS - I definitely don't disagree with your general point, but it might be becoming harder to know which areas need patents and which don't.)
deciplex 12y ago
>We will work to ensure the Federal Circuit—the court that hears all patent appeals—diligently applies the new filter on patentability. Doesn't the Federal Circuit have something of a history on cases such as this, where they essentially say 'fuck it, we're not listening to the SCOTUS', and continue to rule as they please? What's to stop them from just doing business as usual in defiance of the Supreme Court?
- tzakrajs 12y ago
  Sure, but then it would probably get appealed...
  - VonGuard 12y ago
    Yup. Just wrote about this, actually: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71372&page=1 http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71372&... The Federal Circuit court has been, essentially, ignoring the supreme court, and has had just about every decision its made on patents in the last 2 years overturned upon appeal to the supreme. I talked to the EFF and they couldn't explain why the circuit was so fucked up. No one's really sure, but they clearly don't listen to the supreme court.
    - spacemanmatt 12y ago
      Honey badger of a Federal Circuit we've got there.
    - deciplex 12y ago
      This is what I was getting at. It's great if the Supreme Court overturns this stuff, however if the Federal Circuit goes on ignoring it, and every case has to be appealed to the Supreme Court thereafter, then the impact is considerably dampened. And, I don't think there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Is there even a precedent for a lower court blatantly ignoring the decisions of a higher one, at this level? Is there anything that can be done about it short of an act of Congress (which we can safely assume would never ever happen)?
jebblue 12y ago
Despite EFF syndrome, patents are a tool, they are not evil, patent trolls are evil, patents are just tools.
- rando289 12y ago
  EFF didn't say patents were evil. I can do that too: Despite inane anonymous commenting syndrome, you are a person, you are not evil, you are just a person.
- r0s 12y ago
  Absurdly oversimplified.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  Patents are a tool that was being abused so badly that the Supreme Court has been taking multiple cases just to try to set things straight. The abuse has been evil.
- noonespecial 12y ago
  Some tools empower evil more than good or even just accidentally do more harm than good more often than not. Land mines for example.
- andy_ppp 12y ago
  This was always going to be the case eventually (a task that was already performed, this just invalidates adding "on a computer"). It's much harder for the law (I would say impossible) to actually judge stuff that is obvious. For example wavelet patents in certain video codecs are absurd - improving fourier transforms in a very very obvious way - but it won't be obvious to a judge or a jury and certainly isn't covered by this supreme court decision. The more specialised people become in certain fields the more 'obvious' discoveries become. The law has no means to understand what rights it's protecting, and for how long they should be protected, which means it will never police the patent's system effectively, no matter what this judgement says. Given how fast software patents and technology change and that the law can't judge them effectively I would suggest that instead of all this mess can we not just have software patents that last a maximum of 5 years.
higherpurpose 12y ago
My favorite part about this is that it shows how idiotic USPTO is for approving such patents in the first place. Hopefully, this will make them reconsider whether they should be approving other types of patents, too, before the Supreme Court puts them in a bad light again, but I'm not holding my breath.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  They do not care.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    They can't care. They don't set policy, Congress does. They just act out Congress' laws.
- euank 12y ago
  There are no ramifications for the USPTO. In addition, approving a patent takes almost no work while not approving one takes significantly longer and can have more bouts of back and forth. The USPTO right now operates on a very loose definition of 'patentability' simply because it is more convenient to do so and the course will sort it out eventually anyways.. and there's absolutely no downside for them other than their own conscious.
spacemanmatt 12y ago
This is great ammo for all the jack-wagons I encounter in daily life who counter my position on patents with the genius position, "What if someone came and just took your house, or your car away. That's your property and you wouldn't like it, would you?"
lostinpoetics 12y ago
while the decision is pretty tightly tailored, it seems like it's SCOTUS' way of opening the door for subsequent arguments regarding pure software patents. take google's page rank patent[1]. one could argue that assigning scores to, say, academic papers based on references cited and then doing that repeatedly is an "abstract idea" and google's recitation of "apply[ing] it" using a computer is not enough to enter into patent eligible subject matter. if you read/listen to the oral argument, the counter argument that doing so on a massive scale is impracticable was flatly rejected. indeed, a million monkeys counting the citations of scholarly pubs could probably perform that method on a decent sized corpus. is the method therefore inherently abstract? will be interesting to see if Alice alters the analysis (albeit slightly) for these types of questions and whether we'll see a pure software issue (without the negative financial/business method clouds in the background) sooner rather than later. [1] http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999
dsplatonov 12y ago
"Admittedly, the Supreme Court did not offer the clearest guidance on when a patent claims merely an abstract idea, but it did offer guidance that should help to invalidate some of the more egregious software patents out there." Where can i find this guidance?
mtdewcmu 12y ago
What exactly is an abstract idea? Is it possible for an idea to be concrete? From looking at examples, "abstract" seems to mean trivial. By trivial, I don't mean obvious or silly, I mean small; i.e. an idea that can be reduced to one or two sentences, like "e-commerce shopping cart." Otherwise it's pretty hard to distinguish ideas about software from ideas about hardware and explain why one is more patentable than the other.
- nardi 12y ago
  An abstract idea isn't physical. You can patent a machine, or a drug. You can't patent a method for dividing two numbers. However, a machine for dividing two numbers—assuming it's novel, not obvious, etc.—is fair game.
  - mtdewcmu 12y ago
    Ok, but what's actually protected is the idea behind the machine, right? A different machine that employed the patented idea would infringe the patent. Maybe what is meant by "abstract idea" is really "an idea in the abstract," i.e. an idea that is not used to make a machine can't be patented; it's the employment of the idea that is patentable.
    - nardi 12y ago
      You're getting confused by the word "idea." You patent a machine, not an idea. If you insist on saying that you patent the "idea" for a machine, then what you can't patent is an "idea about an idea." Ideas about machines are good. Ideas about ideas are no good. Make sense?
      - mtdewcmu 12y ago
        I think I understand patents as well as any average non-lawyer. What I'm trying to do is make sense of the language used to describe patents. It's clear that people can't agree on what they are, because the Supreme Court keeps needing to step in and refine the definition. The language seems not to make sense, which would help to explain why people can't agree on what they are. Ok, you patent a machine. But that statement is vague and ambiguous at best. If I patent a machine that I built, then how could the patent apply to a different machine that I didn't build? Yet, that's the whole point: they apply to classes of machines, including machines that haven't even been built at the time that the patent is granted. The class would seem to be inherently something abstract.

280 points by chaqke 12y ago

chc 12y ago

This is about the same thing that's already on the front page with 70 comments, including a great one by grellas. I'd go there if you're interested in this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916160

Zigurd 12y ago
But now I'm looking at it on a mobile device. That's totally novel.
greenyoda 12y ago
That post was just a link to the actual Supreme Court decision. This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand, so I think it serves a useful purpose.
- icambron 12y ago
  > This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand I really strongly disagree with this. Supreme Court decisions are usually quite readable and will give a you a nuanced overview of the legal background and justifications for the ruling. They're usually very accessible and not nearly as crammed with legal jargon as you might guess. I try to read as many important decisions as I can and I have no legal training at all. I only occasionally have to look up a term. I would say they're easier, on average, for me to read than a CS paper. And after reading a few Scotus papers, you'll have a much deeper understanding of how our legal system works, and of course a great deal more about the individual decisions. You'll even read news articles about a decision and say, "That's not what the decision was about at all!" Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long, and there's nothing wrong with a summary article like this one. But my point is that you shouldn't fear the legalese.
  - jallmann 12y ago
    > Supreme Court rulings are, of course, quite long Interestingly, judges such as Richard Posner think recent opinions are too long. http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-justices-should-cut-bs-from-opinions http://www.law360.com/articles/455840/posner-says-justices-s... (Ignore the linkbait title; the article really is quite good.)
  - eoi 12y ago
    I would add that the court's opinions are typically prefaced with an excellent summary, which can be a solid alternative or supplement to an article.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > This article explains what it's about in language that's easier for people who aren't legal scholars to understand More accurately, this press release puts the spin of an interest group popular on HN on the decision; it is not a neutral explanation of the decision.

briantakita 12y ago

> the Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely adding “a generic computer to perform generic computer functions” does not make an otherwise abstract idea patentable. This statement (and the opinion itself) makes clear that an abstract idea along with a computer doing what a computer normally does is not something our patent system was designed to protect. This opinion gives me hope that reform is possible & that the U.S. government still works with reason. Now the question is are patents still relevant in today's world of internet, rapidly accelerating innovation, and evidence that free/open source research reduces costs?

rayiner 12y ago
Each generation of CPU design or gas turbine design or wireless baseband design, drug design, or nuclear power plant design still takes more R&D money than the last. And nobody was working on a competitive open source LTE baseband last I checked. "Accelerating innovation" is something which, if it exists, touches only a few areas of engineering. In most areas of engineering, innovation has gotten more expensive, not less. Very few things are amenable to a distributed group of hackers working on it. Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD's. And those cost lots of money. We can argue about how necessary patents ever were, but I don't think they're any less necessary today. The question, in my opinion, isn't whether patents are still relevant. Its whether we can draw lines better to leave out less useful ones while keeping that exception from swallowing the patent system. E.g. if a power control module for an LTE radio is patentable if implemented in an ASIC, should it become unpatentable when you implement it in a DSP? If not: how do you allow those patents while invalidating Amazon's One Click shopping patent? To a certain extent, its tempting to just say: "its too hard to draw the lines, its not worth the trouble." That's easy to say if you're not Qualcomm and don't have a dozen companies who'd love to use your work for free.
- richardw 12y ago
  Jet engines are still best designed by a roomful of PhD's. And those cost lots of money. Possibly the wrong example for your argument :) Jet engines can now be designed by a team at SpaceX rather than at NASA, and the team can 3D-print them. That seems like reduced-cost innovation compared to decades past. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-makes-3-d-printing-history.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/02/elon-musk-m... (PS - I definitely don't disagree with your general point, but it might be becoming harder to know which areas need patents and which don't.)

deciplex 12y ago

>We will work to ensure the Federal Circuit—the court that hears all patent appeals—diligently applies the new filter on patentability. Doesn't the Federal Circuit have something of a history on cases such as this, where they essentially say 'fuck it, we're not listening to the SCOTUS', and continue to rule as they please? What's to stop them from just doing business as usual in defiance of the Supreme Court?

tzakrajs 12y ago
Sure, but then it would probably get appealed...
- VonGuard 12y ago
  Yup. Just wrote about this, actually: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71372&page=1 http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71372&... The Federal Circuit court has been, essentially, ignoring the supreme court, and has had just about every decision its made on patents in the last 2 years overturned upon appeal to the supreme. I talked to the EFF and they couldn't explain why the circuit was so fucked up. No one's really sure, but they clearly don't listen to the supreme court.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    Honey badger of a Federal Circuit we've got there.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    This is what I was getting at. It's great if the Supreme Court overturns this stuff, however if the Federal Circuit goes on ignoring it, and every case has to be appealed to the Supreme Court thereafter, then the impact is considerably dampened. And, I don't think there isn't anything anyone can do about it. Is there even a precedent for a lower court blatantly ignoring the decisions of a higher one, at this level? Is there anything that can be done about it short of an act of Congress (which we can safely assume would never ever happen)?

jebblue 12y ago

Despite EFF syndrome, patents are a tool, they are not evil, patent trolls are evil, patents are just tools.

rando289 12y ago
EFF didn't say patents were evil. I can do that too: Despite inane anonymous commenting syndrome, you are a person, you are not evil, you are just a person.
r0s 12y ago
Absurdly oversimplified.
spacemanmatt 12y ago
Patents are a tool that was being abused so badly that the Supreme Court has been taking multiple cases just to try to set things straight. The abuse has been evil.
noonespecial 12y ago
Some tools empower evil more than good or even just accidentally do more harm than good more often than not. Land mines for example.
andy_ppp 12y ago
This was always going to be the case eventually (a task that was already performed, this just invalidates adding "on a computer"). It's much harder for the law (I would say impossible) to actually judge stuff that is obvious. For example wavelet patents in certain video codecs are absurd - improving fourier transforms in a very very obvious way - but it won't be obvious to a judge or a jury and certainly isn't covered by this supreme court decision. The more specialised people become in certain fields the more 'obvious' discoveries become. The law has no means to understand what rights it's protecting, and for how long they should be protected, which means it will never police the patent's system effectively, no matter what this judgement says. Given how fast software patents and technology change and that the law can't judge them effectively I would suggest that instead of all this mess can we not just have software patents that last a maximum of 5 years.

higherpurpose 12y ago

My favorite part about this is that it shows how idiotic USPTO is for approving such patents in the first place. Hopefully, this will make them reconsider whether they should be approving other types of patents, too, before the Supreme Court puts them in a bad light again, but I'm not holding my breath.

spacemanmatt 12y ago
They do not care.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  They can't care. They don't set policy, Congress does. They just act out Congress' laws.
euank 12y ago
There are no ramifications for the USPTO. In addition, approving a patent takes almost no work while not approving one takes significantly longer and can have more bouts of back and forth. The USPTO right now operates on a very loose definition of 'patentability' simply because it is more convenient to do so and the course will sort it out eventually anyways.. and there's absolutely no downside for them other than their own conscious.

spacemanmatt 12y ago

This is great ammo for all the jack-wagons I encounter in daily life who counter my position on patents with the genius position, "What if someone came and just took your house, or your car away. That's your property and you wouldn't like it, would you?"

lostinpoetics 12y ago

while the decision is pretty tightly tailored, it seems like it's SCOTUS' way of opening the door for subsequent arguments regarding pure software patents. take google's page rank patent[1]. one could argue that assigning scores to, say, academic papers based on references cited and then doing that repeatedly is an "abstract idea" and google's recitation of "apply[ing] it" using a computer is not enough to enter into patent eligible subject matter. if you read/listen to the oral argument, the counter argument that doing so on a massive scale is impracticable was flatly rejected. indeed, a million monkeys counting the citations of scholarly pubs could probably perform that method on a decent sized corpus. is the method therefore inherently abstract? will be interesting to see if Alice alters the analysis (albeit slightly) for these types of questions and whether we'll see a pure software issue (without the negative financial/business method clouds in the background) sooner rather than later. [1] http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999

dsplatonov 12y ago

"Admittedly, the Supreme Court did not offer the clearest guidance on when a patent claims merely an abstract idea, but it did offer guidance that should help to invalidate some of the more egregious software patents out there." Where can i find this guidance?

mtdewcmu 12y ago

What exactly is an abstract idea? Is it possible for an idea to be concrete? From looking at examples, "abstract" seems to mean trivial. By trivial, I don't mean obvious or silly, I mean small; i.e. an idea that can be reduced to one or two sentences, like "e-commerce shopping cart." Otherwise it's pretty hard to distinguish ideas about software from ideas about hardware and explain why one is more patentable than the other.

nardi 12y ago
An abstract idea isn't physical. You can patent a machine, or a drug. You can't patent a method for dividing two numbers. However, a machine for dividing two numbers—assuming it's novel, not obvious, etc.—is fair game.
- mtdewcmu 12y ago
  Ok, but what's actually protected is the idea behind the machine, right? A different machine that employed the patented idea would infringe the patent. Maybe what is meant by "abstract idea" is really "an idea in the abstract," i.e. an idea that is not used to make a machine can't be patented; it's the employment of the idea that is patentable.
  - nardi 12y ago
    You're getting confused by the word "idea." You patent a machine, not an idea. If you insist on saying that you patent the "idea" for a machine, then what you can't patent is an "idea about an idea." Ideas about machines are good. Ideas about ideas are no good. Make sense?
    - mtdewcmu 12y ago
      I think I understand patents as well as any average non-lawyer. What I'm trying to do is make sense of the language used to describe patents. It's clear that people can't agree on what they are, because the Supreme Court keeps needing to step in and refine the definition. The language seems not to make sense, which would help to explain why people can't agree on what they are. Ok, you patent a machine. But that statement is vague and ambiguous at best. If I patent a machine that I built, then how could the patent apply to a different machine that I didn't build? Yet, that's the whole point: they apply to classes of machines, including machines that haven't even been built at the time that the patent is granted. The class would seem to be inherently something abstract.