After law school I lost much of my faith in the law. Perhaps because law text books focus on "edge cases," it's easy to get a jaded view of the law, and especially of the US Supreme Court. Today, I feel some of that old faith coming back. In two landmark decisions, Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T [PDF] and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. [PDF], the US Supreme Court has made it much harder to get patents on software, and After law school I lost much of my faith in the law. Perhaps because law text books focus on “edge cases,” it’s easy to get a jaded view of the law, and especially of the US Supreme Court. Today, I feel some of that old faith coming back.In two landmark decisions, Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T [PDF] and KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. [PDF], the US Supreme Court has made it much harder to get patents on software, and has limited US patents reach beyond the US. Ah, common sense comes to the Supreme Court. And near unanimously in both cases. The New York Times reports on KSR:The Supreme Court, in its most important patent ruling in years, on Monday raised the bar for obtaining patents on new products that combine elements of pre-existing inventions. If the combination results from nothing more than “ordinary innovation” and “does no more than yield predictable results,” the court said in a unanimous opinion, it is not entitled to the exclusive rights that patent protection conveys. “Were it otherwise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion, “patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts.” Because most inventions combine previously known elements, the court’s approach to deciding what sort of combination is so “obvious” as to be ineligible for patent protection will have widespread application. The result will be to make patents harder to obtain and defend. “Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress,” Justice Kennedy said. He added that such patents were also undesirable because they might deprive earlier innovations of “their value or utility.”And in Microsoft, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court to side with Microsoft, and rightfully so: Foreign law alone, not United States law, currently governs the manufacture and sale of components of patented inventions in foreign countries,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “If AT&T desires to prevent copying abroad, its remedy lies in obtaining and enforcing foreign patents.Imagine that – common sense! It’s nice that the Supreme Court’s law clerks (since they do much of the work) are a bit more computer savvy than previous generations of clerks. Maybe eventually we’ll get a few open source savvy clerks in, and all hell will break loose. 😉 More coverage from Chris Marino here. Open Source