Comments on: Vonage requests retrial in Verizon patent dispute

Net phone company says Monday's Supreme Court decision on patent obviousness is likely to have a "positive impact" on its case.

[billmosby]

If the description is accurate...

If the description here of the Supreme Court's ruling on
obviousness is correct, that should take care of a lot of the
software patents, many of which are trivial improvements on or just
outright ripoffs of common, well-known techniques. In my humble
opinion, of course!

[MSSlayer]

I hope it does get retried

Who thought that this court would finally get the ball rolling towards axing bogus patents(ie all software patents)?

[balooh]

"software patents" are not the problem

The problem is that too many patents overall are granted
without actually meeting the legal criteria, that is they lack an
inventive step and novelty. Whether those undeserved patents
are about software or not is totally irrelevant -- patent grants
for "inventions" which do not meet the legal criteria are harmful
in any event.

In many cases what geeks perceive to be a software patent is not
considered a software patent under the law. Take codecs for
example. Many DSP techniques used in codecs are patent
encumbered and it does not matter if the codec is then realised
in hardware or software or a hybrid thereof. If a codec uses
patent encumbered DSP techniques then the patents apply -
whether you turn it into a chip or into a piece of software, it
doesn't matter. In fact those patents even apply to software
implementations of such a codec in countries where software
patents are not permissible.

The problem of undeserved patents cannot be solved by riding
on the "software patents are evil" theme. It can only be solved by
actually enforcing existing patent legislation, making sure that
examination is carried out thoroughly enough that undeserved
patents are not granted in the first place. Most people seem to
forget that granting undeserved patents is against the law. The
patent offices may be overwhelmed and understaffed, but they
break the law when they grant patents which do not meet the
legal criteria. This is the root cause of the problem.