On College Football 2022: Week 6 Recap and Week 7 Pre... Ken said: |
Yeah, we've both had our share of hope and disappointment in this game. Let's just hope for a good b... |
On College Football 2022: Week 6 Recap and Week 7 Pre... Dan* said: |
I'm not sure how I feel about this game. On one hand, I feel pretty optimistic that we have the tale... |
On College Football 2022: Week 1 Preview Dan* said: |
Glad to see you'll be back writing football again, Ken! Congrats on the easy win today. You didn't ... |
On College Football 2021: Week 10 Recap and Week 11 P... Ken said: |
Yeah, sorry one of our teams had to lose. I've come to appreciate Penn State as a classy and sympath... |
On College Football 2021: Week 10 Recap and Week 11 P... Dan* said: |
Hey Ken, congratulations on the win yesterday! Some really odd choices by our coaching staff in that... |
KSR vs. Teleflex | Wednesday, 2007 May 2 - 9:43 pm |
A recent Supreme Court ruling may have significant implications for the tech industry. A recent Supreme Court decision, KSR v. Teleflex, established what may be a new standard for evaluating patent validity. I've railed against patent blackmail before. These days, instead of protecting and fostering innovation, patents are being used to stifle innovation. Companies and individuals are filing patent lawsuits, using ridiculously obvious patents, as a way of extorting money from wealthy companies who are actually bringing novel and useful products to market. Sometimes these patents are simple rehashes of existing business practices, but combined with use of a computer or the Internet. Apple, for example, is currently the target of several patent lawsuits... one of them is an ancient and vague patent about clicking different parts of a computer screen to change the screen's display contents. (Geez, NOBODY would ever have thought of THAT.) So companies now spend millions on building up their own portfolios of ridiculous patents, to defend themselves against this kind of litigation. That money could be better spent on real research and innovation. But now, maybe that will all change. KSR seems to establish a new standard for patent validity. Previously, the standard was called the "teaching-suggestion-motivation" (TSM) test; it was designed to test whether a person of "ordinary skill" would have come up with the patent concept, given the basic building blocks of the concept (prior art). The idea of the TSM test was to eliminate the chance that a novel concept would be considered obvious in hindsight. The Supreme Court now seems to suggest that the TSM test is being mis-applied. The new test is whether a person of ordinary skill and ordinary creativity would have come up with the patent's content. It remains to be seen whether thousands of existing patents are invalidated by a sea of challenge lawsuits, but that would be infinitely preferable to what we have now. |
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