After looking at cases, I can see how difficult it would be for courts to decide on matters relating to obviousness in technology. I saw from a source that over 80% of startups in Silicon Valley are software related companies. But again, how is it that software patents are so problematic? With all the software companies doing so well these days, what will happen to software patents?
While going through several articles on the web, I was able to look at this article. It states that Kelora patent was found obvious. And it also asked to the readers whether the software patents are dangerous or not? Some claim that software patents should be voided because many software patents are obvious over prior art. Courts also realized this and are trying to analyze software patents even more carefully. (Though I believe software should also be allowed to be patented since I know how hard it is to invent software)
Kelora had a patent on parametric search(faceted). This company is stated that it's a hybrid company between a patent troll and practicing entity offering search product. Kelora's suits included internet giants like Microsoft, Ebay, Target, Amazon, and NewEgg. Many others just went onto settle with Kelora rather than going to lawsuits. Many, however, believed that Kelora's patents should be invalid because it is prior art going early as 1960s. Many companies fought with Kelora that its patents were too obvious.
Finally, the courts decided with summary judgement that since client/server systems were well known as early as 1990s, it did not matter whether inventors did not know such system when they created it.
This is promising for companies because it shows that courts are taking one step further to analyze it through sophisticated interpretation. This patent was voided due to prior art under obviousness standard. Again, I feel that this issue of obviousness is problematic in patents. It creates confusion and problems for both the inventors and defendants of patents. It's stated that defendants of this case against Kelora used significant resources already, they were able to avoid going into full trial.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/26/kelora-obvious-software-patents/
You chose great topics to discuss--please keep up the hard work.
ReplyDelete:) Thanks for commenting!
DeleteI feel like the purpose of non-obviousness is to eliminate cases like Kelora's lawsuits. I did not dig into the full detail. But judging from the sources, Kelora is making use of its patents granted in the early days to litigate.
ReplyDeleteBy fully understand the purpose of non-obviousness requirement, I believe it's necessarily to enforce the non-obviousness requirement if possible. Because granting an obvious patent will only cost us more by introducing more chance for those entities to litigate through their obvious patents.
Sometimes, these kind of patents are truly stopping everyone from innovating. Granting an obvious patent will indeed stop everyone inventing what could be life changing experience.
DeleteIn one of my posts, I explored this case that the Supreme Court is currently examining called Alice v. CLS Bank, in which they are debating the issue of software implemented patents. In this case, the SC is determining whether a software-implemented version of an already existing financial solution should be deemed patent-worthy, or whether this is merely an obvious invention. This is really interesting because clearly, putting it into software adds a great deal of utility to the invention, but does it really involve ingenuity?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thought! Indeed, I saw many posts dealing with Alice v. CLS Bank. I feel that software patents are really starting to heat up the argument in the courts because they are unclear what to judge them on. I'd like to know what happens next to software patents because there are thousands of startups beginning to rise in SV. They would all get impacted one way or another.
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