Good. In my view, the existing ruling desperately needs to be overturned.
And I'm cautiously optimistic. The Supreme Court has shown itself to be far more sane on IP than the Federal Circuit.
And I'm cautiously optimistic. The Supreme Court has shown itself to be far more sane on IP than the Federal Circuit.
Congress passed in 1982 a statue called the Federal Courts Improvement Act, where instead of having a random judge make decision, you now instead have selected judges specialized in IP. Those specialized judges comes from lawyers who have worked for companies protection their IP, and thus a bias in favor of IP in the court of appeal. When the case goes to the supreme court this bias goes away.
No.
Instead of the geographic Circuit Courts of Appeal hearing patent cases, any first appeal of a case with any patent claims involved goes to court specialized in Patent cases.
Other IP (copyright, trademark, trade secrets, right of publicity) cases are not affected and have appeals go through the regular geographic circuits, so substituting “IP” for “patent” is incorrect.
(Oracle v. Google is a copyright case, so why is CAFC and not the 9th Circuit involved? Because there were also patent claims in the case, so even after they were dead the Federal Circuit “owned” the appeal.)
This is in direct contrast to decades of consensus that APIs are not copyrightable, and furthermore, there is a particular procedure to go through [clean room technique, which Google did] to ensure that the API is reimplemented without infringing any copyright.
Letting this ruling stand would mean that nearly every piece of software you use infringed someone's copyright.
*corrected from "second district court"
More: Recall that copyright lasts close to forever. (95 years for corporations, if I recall correctly.) This ruling, then, would have allowed IBM to sue every BIOS clone maker, and keep a stranglehold on the PC market, and still have that stranglehold to this day, and be able to keep it until 2076. Then, on August 2, 2076, then we could get IBM-compatible PCs.
Compare that to actual history, and you can see why I think the current ruling is horrible.