Saturday, June 19, 2010

Waiting for Godot?

On June 17, IPWatchDog talked about the wait for a Supreme Court decision in Bilski.

Which is going to happen first:

--> Supreme Court Bilski decision
--> Passage of S.515, or any patent reform package in Congress
--> Rahul Jindal reveals why his determination of a "very high quality patent"
has any significant meaning

Hint: only one of these "has" to happen.

**IPWatchDog also notes that the Supreme Court Speeches page is incomplete. In a Ginsburg speech at Bolton Landing in June 2009:

The press tends to focus on splits with the Chief Justice, and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito ranged on one side; Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer on the other. It is not always so. True, nine of the 17 5-4 decisions already released shaped up that way.4 But in five of the 5-4’s, Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer composed the majority.

which proves that in 13 of the 17 5-4 votes, Kennedy was the key vote. That's 76%.

**Of Bilski, the blog patlit writes:

In Bilski, Elena Kagan -- President Obama's new Supreme Court nominee -- wrote the amicus brief opposing certiorari and the merits brief, arguing that petitioner's business method cannot be patented. Kagan largely relies on a contention that methods of organizing human activity only are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. 101; and on the point that Bilski's claim is too abstract to be patent-eligible. Perhaps most importantly, Kagan strongly urges the Court to issue a narrow ruling. As she puts it,
"The [Circuit] court’s decision ... properly leaves questions not presented by petitioners’ application, such as the circumstances under which computer software may be patented, for resolution in future cases ... petitioners’ patent application involves none of the frontier technologies on which the petition dwells ... they are essentially irrelevant to the proper disposition of this case ... Further review is not warranted."
In other words, if Chien's prediction holds and the Supreme Court heeds the counsel of their friends in the government, those hoping for a sweeping pronouncement on computer software patentability will likely be disappointed.


Also

Moreover, "In every single Supreme Court patent case ... in which the US government filed an amicus brief except for one, the Court sided with the government." In practical terms, this means that one can predict the outcome of a case just by looking at the government's brief.

If there's one, then one can't absolutely predict.

[IPBiz post 6000]

1 Comments:

Blogger Rahul said...

Lawrence,

I didn't realize that you were waiting with bated breath for further details on validation of my patent scoring work to the same degree as all of us are for Bilski! Here are some examples attempting to satiate some of the curiosity http://optisourcing.blogspot.com/2010/06/patent-scoring-validation-for-dr-ebert.html

Mail me directly if you are looking for more validation and have ideas on the same.

Best,
Rahul

11:14 PM  

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