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Software Patents Are Crumbling, Thanks To The Supreme Court

Publication Date: 
September 12, 2014
Source: 
Vox
Author: 
Timothy B. Lee

Professor Mark Lemley is mentioned in this Vox article by Timothy B. Lee regarding how the Supreme Court's ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank has changed the patent landscape. 

The Supreme Court's June ruling on the patentability of software — its first in 33 years — raised as many questions as it answered. One specific software patent went down in flames in the case of Alice v. CLS Bank, but the abstract reasoning of the decision didn't provide much clarity on which other patents might be in danger.

Now a series of decisions from lower courts is starting to bring the ruling's practical consequences into focus. And the results have been ugly for fans of software patents. By my count there have been 11 court rulings on the patentability of software since the Supreme Court's decision — including six that were decided this month. Every single one of them has led to the patent being invalidated.

...

"My immediate reaction was that this would be extremely bad for software patents," patent attorney Gene Quinn wrote last week of the Alice ruling. He interviewed patent scholar Mark Lemley. While Lemley doesn't think all software patents are invalid, he predicts that "a majority of the software patents being litigated right now" will be found invalid based on the Supreme Court's precedents.