Posted on 06/09/2008 8:40:30 PM PDT by antiRepublicrat
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday limited the ability of companies to collect multiple royalties on their patents, the latest step by the justices to scale back the power of patent-holders.
The unanimous decision, which was helpful to customers of Intel Corp., involved a longtime Supreme Court doctrine that in recent years had been eroded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., which handles patent cases nationally.
Justice Clarence Thomas reined in the appeals court, saying that "for over 150 years the Supreme Court has applied the doctrine of patent exhaustion" and that it applies in this case. The doctrine says that the sale of an invention exhausts the patent-holder's right to control how the purchaser uses it.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
Gotta love Justice Thomas. And it's a unanimous decision, rare these days for contentious issues.
Good news finally.
Not sure what this has to do with software - this is patent law, not copyright law. And, if you’re producing software for profit, you may limit its use however you wish. If you don’t like it, write your own. It’s impossible to patent software, as there’s million ways of writing the same thing. But you can copyright it - ie, you cannot use my software without paying me for it.
It is possible to patent a process though. Lots of software is protected by patent on the grounds that it implements a particular process. Remember the Diffy-Hillman patent that supposedly covered all public key cryptography? And how about the the Unisys patent on LZW compression which for years prevented website developers from implementing on-the-fly .gif generators.
Check out the League for Programming Freedom.
They have several horror stories about software patents.
The site seems to be down at the moment.
But check out:
http://www.programmersheaven.com/download/4762/download.aspx
They both stem from the same constitutional authorization. For example, the doctrine of exhaustion of rights used here applies to copyrights, too.
It’s impossible to patent software
It used to be.
But you can copyright it - ie, you cannot use my software without paying me for it.
The question this case helps to answer is how many rights do you retain after I've paid you for it.
Ah yea I do agree on the “business process” patents.
Whatever the license you signed/agreed to says.
The only reason there are licenses is because the law, as authorized by the Constitution, gave copyright to the author. But that right comes with various exceptions and limits, so the author can't demand more than what was granted him.
Well that’s fine. I don’t see how the author can demand more than what is in the original license/contract.
Think about it this way: the original contract is the one between the author and the people of the United States -- the one that granted the author copyright. Any subsequent contracts, like a highly-restrictive EULA, can't go beyond the bounds of the original contract. If the original contract says people can make backups of software (it does, 17 USC 117(a)), then a license can't prohibit it.
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