Chosen Plaintext Indistinguishable from white noise

US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the Bilski case

I sometimes get excited reading court documents. The latest one to pique my interest is the most recent transcript of oral arguments in Bilski v. Kappos that were heard by the US Supreme Court on Monday.

The Bilski case is important because it could abolish the practice of patenting business methods and—hopefully—software. This is great news for those of us who are trying to do new and exciting things with software, because patents stifle innovation in software instead of encouraging it.

What's really exciting about this case is that the justices are asking some very good questions. They seem to understand that patents can hurt innovation:

JUSTICE BREYER: Okay. Well then, if that were so, we go back to the original purpose of the Constitution. Do you think that the framers would have wanted to require anyone successful in this great, vast, new continent because he thinks of something new to have had to run to Washington and to force any possible competitor to do a search and then stop the wheels of progress unless they get permission?

They see through the wording trick of patenting not software per se, but a computer loaded with certain software:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Mr. Stewart, I thought I understood your argument up until the very last footnote in your brief. And you say this is not -- simply the method isn't patentable because it doesn't involve a machine. But then you say but it might be if you use a computer to identify the parties that you are setting a price between and if you used a microprocessor to calculate the price. That's like saying if you use a typewriter to type out the -- the process then it is patentable. I -- I -- it -- that takes away everything that you spent 53 pages establishing.

They also suggest that it might be difficult to disallow business method patents while allowing software patents:

JUSTICE BREYER: But then all we do is every example that I just gave, that I thought were examples that certainly would not be patented, you simply patent them. All you do is just have a set of instructions for saying how to set a computer to do it. Anyone can do that. Now, it's a machine.
So all the business patents are all right back in. Now, that -- what I think we were looking for was -- or at least I was -- was why that isn't so, and how you are going to later, down the road, deal with this situation of all you do is you get somebody who knows computers, and you turn every business patent into a setting of switches on the machine because there are no businesses that don't use those machines.

As usual with something like this, Groklaw is covering it.