Valent Turkovic wrote:
Quote from http://www.pli.edu/patentcenter/blog.asp?view=plink&id=368 :
Here are the highlights:
* The Federal Circuit rejected the that the "useful, concrete and tangible
result" inquiry as being inadequate.
* Patentability under 101 does not depend on process steps, but rather
requires a tangible machine or transformation into a different state.
* *Software* *is* *once* *again* *unpatentable* *in* *the* *United* *States*
* In order to protect what was formerly known as patentable software we
will have to go back to claiming a machine that provides certain
functionality.
* Software patents that have been issued under the previous understanding
of the law are almost certainly now worthless.
Also from http://ben.klemens.org/blog/arch/00000009.htm:
Despite claiming that all that matters is the
machine-or-transformation test, the ruling also bears in mind many
other necessary conditions for patentability, such as the rule that a
patent may not “wholly pre-empt” a law of nature or principle or
mathematical formula. Also, if you wholly pre-empt a mathematical
algorithm within some narrow field of endeavor, the court rules that
this is still a pre-emption. I'll have a little more on this below.
Note "a patent may not 'wholly pre-empt' ... a mathematical formula".
...which means all those codecs from livna/rpmfusion just became 100%
legal, no royalty required*.
(* assuming the copyright license is not an issue, of course)
--
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
--
Igor Peshansky: Don't hippos love water even more than dogs?
Dave Korn: Don't ask me. I didn't even know that hippos loved dogs.
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
