Pretty unsurprising news today, as the Supreme Court handed down their decision in the patent case of Microsoft v i4i. I’ve written about the case before, back when the oral arguments were heard, and noted that Microsoft was extremely unlikely to win.
Well, Microsoft actually did worse than I could have imagined, somehow losing Judge Breyer’s vote and falling to i4i in an 8-0 decision (one justice recused himself for owning a significant share of Microsoft, and even HE said he would have voted for i4i). It was really an uphill battle for Microsoft from the get-go: they were trying to lower the bar for the standard applied when a patent is challenged, from a clear and convincing standard to anything lower, but decades of court precedent and complicit silence on the part of Congress made it unlikely that the Court would step in and reverse standing law without good reason. Sotomayor wrote a snarky opinion, basically dismissing Microsoft as having no case, and the clear and convincing evidence standard will live another day (and likely for a very, very long time).
Unfortunate, because the patent system could really use some more editing and the Court had shown a willingness to adopt change by brute force in some recent cases. But alas, the patent system remains broken, to the surprise of nobody.
danielmarkmiller.net 