The software patent world has become so ridiculously complex that it was nearly impossible for anyone to NOT infringe on someone else's "patented" ideas"
please give examples. This affects your industry. You stand to gain by this ruling to the deficit of inventors honestly inventing

herb, look at the numbers of gulchers who support this decision. I am appalled

So all of you patent haters are victims? Victims of industrious people who invent? How so? Please pick and choose industries that are null and void of disruptive invention. Please tell me how you have not benefited by inventions you claim have always been there. Watch innovation stifle and go underground. I wish you good luck. Because you have turned your minds OFF

that is how the patent system works

please consider reading db's non-fiction book, "The Decline and Fall of the American Entrepreneur.." The rise of a modern patent system allowed the WORLD to escape the Malthusian trap.
"A method for making fire. (“If you don’t pay my licensing fee, you are morally obliged to freeze to death.”)" If I do not feed YOU, I am guilty of murder?

yes, and so have other inventors. Why is your technology so important that you can steal? We deal with dozens of software companies. and we understand your frustrations in wanting to get a product out the door. We also understand the guy who first came up with intermittent windshield wipers, the fountain pen, the first micro-processor...
Your arguments are based on emotion and expediency. Sure there are bad patents that get through. The vast majority are hard fought and take years to acquire. That's right. think a decade in terms of cell phones. What's obvious to you today was thought up a decade ago or more. All of our inventors say:
"We are a bootstrap company that has worked our way up from[ 'a table at the Carl's Jr] halfway between our respective homes' to nice offices and a product that is sold around the world. We have worked for everything we have attained, and done it with integrity."
I simply responded to your own words. Go re-read what you said. You did not care, because you *needed* it.

again, you give opinion with no evidence. This prior art is cited all the time in cases. Next...

It’s a good thing that patents weren’t around in primitive times. Aside from the wheel, many other inventions and discoveries would have been eligible for patents:

The spear and other weapons. (“If you don’t pay my licensing fee, you must hunt wild animals with your bare hands.”)

Cave art. (“I’ve patented this method of creating a representation of a wooly mammoth. Give me my licensing fee.”)

A method for making fire. (“If you don’t pay my licensing fee, you are morally obliged to freeze to death.”)

Money. (“If you want to use it as a medium of exchange, I’ll need my cut.”)

Maybe even the patent system itself. (“I own the patent on patents, so you can’t patent your invention without paying me a patent fee.”)

we could do it better -- call her on a tin can and a
string! let's see. where is she, northern Argentina?
long string.... there are a lot of inventions between
the can-and-string and the computer, all of them
patentable, including software. (code-frozen ideas) -- j

Who invented the wheel? A patent lawyer in Australia patented it in 2001 (to prove a point). As Hiraghm points out (below) the patent of the whole desktop metaphor has been under discussion among MS/Apple/Xerox (the lastmentioned being the one who probably developed it - but who did not patent it). The desktop metaphor is in virtually universal use. The important point that you miss is that the people who are making these spurious patents are NOT the people who developed them in the first place. These people are finding someone else's developments, which have been in common use for years (but which were never patented by their inventors) and taking out a spurious patent on them. Like patenting the wheel.

Do you think anybody does, or should, pay for the use of the 'concept' of a car's steering wheel? Even if I patented 'circular directional vehicle manipulation device' today, it would not be because I had invented it (no clue who did or when) but because I was trying to sequester the use of a common item by 'gaming' the patent system.

We develop brilliant and original medical software. Our software has to perform the same tasks as all other medical software, however, so there is a lot of convergent evolution evident in the screen display (though the underlying code is completely different). "Show a list of patient names that partially match the entered characters" is something that medical software has to do, whatever its origin. This is a concept, and should not be patentable. We also have to be useable 'out of the box' to our customers, which means using the common tools and look of a gui dashboard. So we use sliders and radio buttons and all of the other conventional display tools.

We are a bootstrap company that has worked our way up from 'a table at the Carl's Jr halfway between our respective homes' to nice offices and a product that is sold around the world. We have worked for everything we have attained, and done it with integrity. I will thank you not to state, nor imply, that we are moochers. We have done nothing but produce excellent laboratory software at reasonable prices. We use the common tools that all software companies use and if this makes us moochers in your book, then you have just excluded from the 'Producer' category all of the software entrepreneurs that are providing products in all industries all over the world.

Jan

I really don't think this ruling is either wrong or a bad thing for the industry in general. The software patent world has become so ridiculously complex that it was nearly impossible for anyone to NOT infringe on someone else's "patented" ideas. I think it is also absurd that all you have to do to get around any particular patent is simply add a few extra words of code to slightly alter how something gets done.

As an IT guy of 20+ years, I really don't think this ruling is the death-knell for software patents that khalling thinks, but rather a breath of fresh air to and industry long held hostage by the hoarding of IP.

Actually if you have an actual look at what is done all around you, you see at the appearance of every new generation of device a flurry of applications, most of them resembling each other, and these reflect the very capabilities now enabled.
As for the GUI etc, it was not 50 years ago but 60 years ago that the development was spectacularly kickstarted. Just refer to Engelbart 's demo in 1968, showing this new paradigm, enabled by raster display, pointing input devices, packet transmissions, etc. The basic idea was and is still the same : reproduce intuitive behaviors. The results are naturally very close to each other precisely because of that.

Now, about your dear "One click" that you introduced and keep putting on top of the stack. Never heard of a cookie ? A cookie is what enables that, it is meant to create persistence on top of an otherwise non persistent protocol. Once you get a persistent session, you don't need to re-authenticate, that's the whole point, and keeping your payment information is an obvious application. That's why that patent should never have been granted in the first place. But of course, lawyers are not programmers, they make money by making gullible people think that an obvious consequence of a functionality can ever be implemented once, preferably by the first thief to come to the patent office with a claim to it.

Oh, and by the way, the Patent Office is far, far from being as efficient is checking claims as you seem to be persuaded of. Just lookup "USPTO staggering incompetence for a recent instance which made it to mainstream media".

"When you buy a car, you depend on it having 'a steering wheel' and 'some sort of a shift' and 'a MPH display'."
yes, these things are all inventions and they change over time. and yes, YOU take them for granted. But people are in the business of developing these things you take for granted and are out there everywhere. What individuals like yourself conveniently ignore is that the cost and time and talent involved in developing those ideas happened first-when you didn't see how simple and obvious it was to driving. All of the time, talent, time and costs are risks to businesses and individuals which are leveraged against the value in intellectual property. This includes all these guis. Someone came up with them and it wasn't spontaneous. Patents are limited.
"We cannot care if these items are patented because we must use them whether or not they are. (I speak for pretty much all software developers here, not just our company.) " jan, this statement sounds eerily like a moocher right out of Atlas Shrugged. If you "must" and it infringes, buy a license! Most are easily done and inexpensive. That's their purpose. Your company cannot "reinvent all wheels" that's the point of a license. That's how inventors make a profession out of what they do.
If you get to have every technological advance in developing your own technology for free-why would someone design them in the first place? A gift to your software company?

You did answer my question. If it was so "obvious" why wasn't everyone using it? The Patent and Trademark Office is very vigilent in looking for prior art-anything out in the public domain as well. Programmers always make these specious claims with no proof. Let's take an example of "event capture devise" 50 years ago and apply it to One Click.

"One click" is so obvious that it should never have been patented in the first place. "Slide to unlock", ditto : any number of patents derives from the simple capture of a series of events. This has existed since the inception of event capture devices, probably back to nearly 50 years ago, now. You are obviously no programmer, you speak like a lawyer. Given an existing set of possibilities, enabled by the simple existence of physical inputs, the entire set of "gestures" and the like can be recreated by any programmer worth his salt, independently from the others, and that stems from the fact that these are intuitive, meaning that anybody is going to think about it, and the difficulty to implement obvious ideas is very low (of course, not for a lawyer, whose job is to make the simplest things look extremely complicated to outsiders).

Say goodbye to creativity for profit.
This makes me so angry that I would do something drastic, if I wasn't an old disabled fart.

You cannot make software for general commercial use and not use radio buttons, checkboxes, pulldown lists, sliders, etc. These are common gui display items. I have heard it alleged that all of the abovementioned items have been patented. (I have not verified that these items have been patented; if I get the time to do this research I will be glad to let you know more details.)

It does not matter: One cannot write software without using these common denominators in the user interface - it would mean that your users would have to learn every tool de novo. As it is, when I first came to this forum I already knew how to 'type in a text box' and 'use a slider' and 'push a Reply or Cancel button'.

When you buy a car, you depend on it having 'a steering wheel' and 'some sort of a shift' and 'a MPH display'. If someone had patented these items and every brand of car had to invent a new way of driving it would mean a learning curve was added to each change of car - and you would not have any enduring 'driving reflexes'. Similarly with respect to the software user interface, you need to use the conventional display items so that a new user already knows how to work the tools and just needs to learn the software itself. We cannot care if these items are patented because we must use them whether or not they are. (I speak for pretty much all software developers here, not just our company.)

So it does not matter if these items all have spurious patents (usually held by someone who did NOT develop or premier the use of that item, but by someone who retrospecitvely patented something that was already common): If you want to write marketable software, you must use the commonly understood tools.

The only thing that protects us is, as I mentioned, that these patents are generally used only against major competitors and we - and the plethora of other small software companies - are safely small and obscure.

Jan

For those of us who do not consider patents to be legitimate property, the Supreme Court made the right call.

And the legal issues regarding computer-related patents are only going to get murkier as computers continue to become more powerful and produce inventions of their own without direct human intervention.

code is not patentable in and of itself. It is copyright-able material.
"Ideally, these patents on generalized functions would not have been issued and we would all be able to innovate, but as it is the only thing that keeps the software industry working is that these spurious patents are only dusted off to use as a targeted assault against a major competitor (we little folk are not worthy of such notice). "
jan, what patents are you referring to? You are making broad statements with no support.
"but we are aware that everything we do probably involves infringing on a spurious patent someone else has acquired (such as patents on common GUI functions)"
If in fact you are knowing violating patents, that is against the law. Why would you want to recreate what someone else has invented. Patent searches are relatively simple to do. The information is all out there. Why not do the due diligence first? Could save you lots of valuable time.

If "One Click" was not that desirable, why didn't Barnes and Noble just work around it with 2 clicks? No, it was extremely valuable to their business model and they stole it. The only specifics you give in your comment are "slide to unlock" which is covered by multiple patents. Which patent are you referring to? Have you read the claims of the patent? Until you you offer proof for your wild assertions of "abusive appropriation of obviousness" I cannot gauge the objectivity of your statements

Since the beginning, most software patents are a blatant scam, without originality whatsoever, used to stifle competitors. Making something really, fundamentally original in software happens extremely rarely. Nothing common with real engineering patents, actually. The comparison with Galt's engine is insulting to Galt. On one hand (Galt), you have an example of true genious at work. On the other hand (patented software), you have mere repackaging of public knowledge in a bid to extort competitors. One can not count the number of "XOR sprite", "slide to unlock" etc, kind of ridiculous claims that just an abusive appropriation of obviousness. I for one am glad this charade is over. Keep the patenting process as clean as possible, do not clutter it with countless stupid claims of invention where there is no real justification.

Actually, as VP of a software company, this ruling comes as a relief. Many of the software related patents that have been issued in the past put us in jeopardy. We write innovative medical software that comes out of our own little brains, but we are aware that everything we do probably involves infringing on a spurious patent someone else has acquired (such as patents on common GUI functions). There have been a number of big corporations suing each other over infringement of a patent that was issued on something such as 'the concept of wireless email', for instance.

Ideally, these patents on generalized functions would not have been issued and we would all be able to innovate, but as it is the only thing that keeps the software industry working is that these spurious patents are only dusted off to use as a targeted assault against a major competitor (we little folk are not worthy of such notice).

It is as if someone had patented 'the idea of a gear shift' or 'the idea of displaying the MPH on the dashboard of a car' - patents that have been issued in the past are for the gears and dashboards of pretty much any gui software. The little slider to the right of the box into which I am typing may represent a patent infringement...

I think that 'copyright' may be a better term to apply to software. Anyone who stole our base code would be stealing our product*; someone who looks at the neat things we can do and then goes off to figure out how to code these things on his own: more power to him! We have no hesitation in demo-ing our product to our competitors, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" (Shelley)

Jan
*They would go crazy trying to figure it out: "Who steals my [base code] steals [lightly commented complexity]." (Shakespeare - slightly altered, perhaps)