We may get a big one; then again, we may not. Either way, Gabriel Malor over at the Federalist listed the remaining big-ticket cases on the docket; since then (as per Gabriel’s update) the Court has decided that SBA List does in fact have standing to challenge Ohio’s absolutely awful anti-free speech law. So there’s that.
I am actually assuming that we’ll get maybe only one large case today if we get any at all. So watch: they’ll clear the docket and take the summer off, or something. Predicting what the Supreme Court will do is a mug’s game (although it does look like the Court will mightily spank the administration over recess appointments). We’ll see at ten AM…
No big ones, 3 unanimous decisions. At quick glance, the only interesting one is that SCOTUS appears to have sharply limited software patents. I say appears, because I’ve only skimmed the first bit.
I am .. not displeased .. by limits to software patents.
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There are many *far* too broad tech patents out there, the Grid Systems Corporation patent on a clamshell laptop comes to mind, and it’s not even a particularly obnoxious one.
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Mew
Well the specific limitation is that abstract ideas are not patentable, and merely stating ‘implement this abstract idea on a general purpose computer’ is not sufficient to transform it from abstract to concrete. Unanimous decision, with a 1 paragraph concurrence from Ginsburg, Sotomajor, Breyer indicating that they’d also hold process patents in general to be invalid.
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So now we’ll probably get a decade or so of wrangling exactly where the limits are here. Because approximately 100% of all software patents are of the form, ‘describe this algorithm and implement it on a general purpose computer’.
I’m hoping for a good ruling on Harris v. Quinn that pulls union fangs out and jams them back in somewhere painful.