[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.