[wahern]

Judges don't grant patents, patent examiners do. AFAICT it doesn't seem this patent has been litigated in court.

I went to law school[1] with several patent examiners. Some of them not only share the belief that these patents are B.S., they're often programmers and Free Software advocates. Nonetheless, they've approved patents like these because their job is to adhere to the interpretive guidelines written by Patent Office lawyers, and to be as fair and consistent as possible.

Judges can sometimes be equally knowledgable, though it's worth pointing out that Federal judges of general jurisdiction tend to have a more restrictive view of both patentability and copyrightability. Whereas judges that spend more time adjudicating these disputes tend to hold a more expansive view. Sometimes subject matter experience is a bad thing.

There's a widespread strain of legal and economic thought that believes using property rights as a vehicle for the exchange of inventions and creative works is almost always the most economically efficient method of facilitating innovation and creativity. If you hold this belief, you'll tend to take a very expansive view of patentability and copyrightability, have a very strict interpretation of obviousness (patents) and originality (copyrights), and will significantly discount the apparent costs these legal regimes impose; you're convinced that you're actually lowering costs and expanding markets, but that this benefit isn't readily discernible. So if you've ever wondered why an examiner or judge might permit patenting a swing, it may be because they actually believed the world would be better off for it. It sounds crazy, I know, but this type of thinking exists, these people are sincere believers, and they have mountains of "research" to back up their views.

Hackers just aren't usually exposed to such views because for better or worse, and particularly in the context of patents and copyrights, we live and work in an echo chamber. Unfortunately, the views of lawyers and legal scholars in our community aren't representative of even mainline legal opinion, let alone the opinions of the people I just described. Ever wonder why Lawrence Lessig has an abysmal record at winning and predicting cases, especially for big Supreme Court cases?

[1] I've never practiced law, though.

[Blakestr]

My wife is an attorney at an appellate court and tells me she doesn't think a high majority of judges even know what a PDF is.

I'm guessing this patent is put there to give a big company like Facebook some basic legal framework to flex their muscles if ever needed; but I can't see this being enforced very easily. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part though.

[wahern]

Probably not, but general jurisdiction judges do know what excessive litigation looks like, and if you told them that PDFs are a pervasive and, presently, largely royalty-free mechanism for exchanging documents, they'll be able to predict fairly well the consequences an expansive or restrictive interpretive view might have regarding future litigation. General jurisdiction judges are so overloaded with cases that they tend to be biased against legal interpretations that might increase litigation, unless they have a strong opinion on a particular issue. And because their cases are of relatively diverse subject matter, they don't tend to become invested in the same legal nuances as IP lawyers and scholars do; they'll prefer simpler, more easily applied rules.

On the other hand, the legal and economic strain of thought I described has been growing for quite some time, especially wrt to copyright (e.g. copyrightability of the bat mobile, which seemed inevitable to me, but was clearly a break with precedent). Liberal patentability hasn't gone mainstream in the same way, if only because the specter of patent trolls is so obvious, whereas we've all become inured to the reality of perpetual copyrights and a nearly non-existent public domain.