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by kiba
2144 days ago
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I think it's becoming if not already became apparent that IP law is deeply flawed. Unfortunately, it's a problem for a long time. This isn't something that happened in the last few decades. Hollywood was in California to avoid Edison's patents. The Wright brothers spent their time and energy suing people and engaging in feud instead of spending their time improving their inventions. 3D printing didn't really emerge as a hobby market until the 2000s after the expiration of patents. Makerbot Inc apparently patented inventions that belonged to the 3D printing community at large, and then get bought up by Stratasys. So you get intellectual common theft, inventors suing people instead of further innovating, patent trolling, etc. |
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Yes, all of those things have been problems for a long time. However, the application of patent law to software and business methods is relatively recent (in legal terms). In the US, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has been largely responsible for growing the scope of software patents since its creation in 1982 (e.g., holding that use of an analog to digital converter or a memory storage device were all that is needed to meet the Supreme Court's 1981 Diamond v. Diehr test that a software patent has to actually do something, rather than just being a conventional implementation of inherently unpatentable math). This culminated in the 1998 State Street decision (again, of the CAFC, not the Supreme Court) that opened the floodgates for business method patents.
Despite Supreme Court decisions like In re Bilski (2009) and CLS Bank International v Alice Corp (2014) that attempted to limit the scope of these patents, and that were hoped (of Alice in particular) to be able to be used to invalidate large swaths of such patents, the CAFC continues to erode the force of these decisions (see, e.g., the 2020 Uniloc decision) and carve out new ways to patent mathematical algorithms implemented on general purpose computers. The allowance of these patents by the USPTO has also been on the rise in recent years.