{"id":50,"date":"2008-11-03T13:28:25","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T18:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/?p=50"},"modified":"2008-11-03T13:28:25","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T18:28:25","slug":"patent-court-you-can-no-longer-patent-thin-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/2008\/11\/patent-court-you-can-no-longer-patent-thin-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Patent Court: You Can No Longer Patent Thin Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In what could be seen as a victory for doers, and a bit of a setback for thinkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has made a rather significant ruling on what is and isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t patentable. The court ruled against<\/a> a man who was attempting to patent \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a method for hedging against weather-related effects on businesses.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d As a result, infamous patents like Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one-click\u00e2\u20ac\u009d shopping concept may no longer be valid, because they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t either \u00e2\u20ac\u0153involve a particular machine\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153physically transform anything.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

In essence, the ruling means that business ideas in and of themselves aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t patentable. In addition to Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one-click\u00e2\u20ac\u009d patent, which is the concept of purchasing something via credit card by just clicking a single website link, Friendster\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s patents on social networking<\/a> also come to mind as being unpatentable based on this judgement. That patent covers a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153system, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153method of inducing content uploads in a social network,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d amongst other claims.<\/p>\n

To me, this all sounds like a pretty reasonable ruling, although two judges offered dissenting opinions. While Friendster so far hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tried to enforce their patent by going after competing social networks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all of which would seemingly be in violation based on their patent claims \u00e2\u20ac\u201c you can imagine the type of drama and disruption of innovation it would cause in our space if they did. For some more in-depth analysis of the ruling and its legal ramifications, check out Mike Masnick\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coverage at Techdirt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto<\/a>\/ ftwitty<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

—
Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:<\/p>\n

In a Boring Turn of Events, Google Gets Sued for Patent Infringement Again<\/a>
Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s One-Click Patent Finally Rejected<\/a>
Friendster Patents Social Networking<\/a>
Another Weird Patent for Amazon: Error Pages<\/a>
Google Sued for Patent Infringement<\/a>
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Groundbreaking\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Social Networking Patent at Auction<\/a>
eBay Wins Round in Court over \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBuy It Now\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Patent<\/a><\/p>\n

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Original source : http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/Mashable\/~3\/IYvcH5z…<\/a><\/div>\n

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In what could be seen as a victory for doers, and a bit of a setback for thinkers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has made a rather significant ruling on what is and isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t patentable. The court ruled against a man who was attempting to patent \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a method for hedging against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thinkstick.dreamhosters.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}