Good news indeed.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the very important Bilski v. Doll case which will examine the legitimacy of so-called "business method" patents and other forms of patents that are not tied to a particular machine or transformative device.

This could be the best opportunity yet for the Court to start to reign in the growing cancer that patent law has mutated into.

News summary here.

Details and filings in the case here.

Not necessarily "good news." The CAFC ruling in Bilski had problems, but it wasn't awful. It definitely was causing many more patents to get rejected. The worry now is what if the SC decides that CAFC's rules were too strict and rolls them back?

Almost every SC patent decision recently has gone against CAFC -- though, they've also all been for scaling back patent system excesses.

Basically, it's not at all clear if this is "good news." That'll very much depend on the outcome, but it could be very bad news if it thinks CAFC went too far this time.

Fair point Mike. But given the general direction on from the Supreme Court on patents in recent years, I'm rather optimistic. It's all going much slower than I'd like, but its going in the right direction.

Justin:

It took us a very long time to get in the situation we are in. We should expect corrections to take less time, but they will take time. Our legal system moves slow for many reasons, but doing our best to find basis in law is one of them.

The Supreme Court is going to have the most dramatic affect on patents with this case that it has had in decades, and possibly centuries.

My view is that this is not a potentially major change. It's just a small potential change. The patent system remains intact with all the problems that flow therefrom: long term; incompetent government bureaucratic examining corps.; presumption of validity; right to injunction; inherently vague, non-objective, and unjust standards for granting the patent monopoly. No tweaking at the margins will make any significant impact.

Stephan -

I understand (and largely agree with) what you are saying in terms of the patent system still being awful even if the Bilski case is given the best outcome possible on the question before the court. But its still significant (and a big positive) that the signs point to the Court at least wanting to shut off a major avenue of mutation/distortion that most in the Patent Bar wish to use to make the system even far worse.

It won't "improve" the patent system substantially, but it has the opportunity to prevent it from becoming much worse than it alreday is.

Yes you are right: There are still problems with overly long terms, evidence rules of validity, easy injunctions, etc. which all benefit the patent industry rather than the inventing industry. But without someone yelling "stop!", all of those those problems will eventually be applied to an ever expanding concept of "invention" - making the problems that much worse. I would argue that it is still fairly significant that the Court may start to signal that there are at least some concrete limits to the concept of patents.

You must admit - that would still be more than what they have said and done regarding concrete limits on copyright terms.

The Supreme Court has decided to review the Bilski case that has major implication for software and business method patents. The Bilski patent application covered a method of hedging risks when trading commodities. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled that the Bilski patent did not fall within the subject matter of patentable material. It reached this decision based on the so called machine or transformation test. Bilski did not recite a machine or transform matter from one state to another state according to the court. If the Supreme Court uses this case to exclude software and business method patents from patent protection, it will stifle innovation in the fastest growing part of the US economy. For more information see http://hallingblog.com/2009/06/08/bilski-software-patents-and-business-method-patents/.

"If the Supreme Court uses this case to exclude software and business method patents from patent protection, it will stifle innovation in the fastest growing part of the US economy."

Bullshit. It will foster innovation. Software and business method patents themselves stifle innovation.