Technology Law Insights by Ray Millien

Last month, I co-authored an article on IPWatchdog.com about the legal, technical and academic communities’ over-a-decade long debate about the boundaries, legality and wisdom of software patents. Now, on June 19, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a decision in its review of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s en banc May 10, 2013, decision in CLS Bank v. Alice . Unfortunately, the clarity that many had hope for has not come to fruition! What we do know for sure – for at least a 150 years now - is that U.S. Patent Law recognizes four broad categories of inventions eligible for patent protection: processes; machines; article of manufacture; and compositions of matter. 35 U.S.C. Section 101. We also know for sure, despite the oft-quoted recognition that the patent laws were made to cover “anything under the sun that is made by man,” Diamond v. Chakrabarty , 447 U.S. 303, 309 (1980) (quoting S. Rep. No. 1979, 82d Cong. 2d. Sess., 5 (1952)), the U.S....

Last week, a report analyzing the median damage awards in 36,629 patent cases from 2000-2013 concluded:   "[T]he median compensatory award of around $400,000 is far less than the typical cost of litigating a patent case to verdict. It highlights a disconnect between the $3-5M required to take a patent case through trial and the remote chances of recovering that amount as damages."  Maybe a better system of (alternate) patent dispute resolution is needed!? (Reminds me of this forgotten provision of U.S. Patent Law: 35 U.S.C. § 294(a) ). These are my current personal views and should not be necessarily attributed to my current or former employers, or their respective clients or customers. Photograph by Tim Evanson on Flickr .