Yes, but it's about 2 decades too late. All the "...on a computer" patents that cover the big things -- selling books, taking a picture on a white background, measuring distances -- have been done and extracted their costs from the industry and consumers.
I think there is value in this ruling beyond 'what is a computer'. For example I founded a startup a number of years ago to do traffic monitoring with an FMCW radar based sensor. In the process of researching patents in the area I found a bunch of patents that were in effect 'radar applied to traffic monitoring'. IANAL but my interpretation of a large number of them was that they were granted based heavily on block diagrams that 'looked novel' but where really just a matter of taking the block diagram of any old off the shelf DSP SoC and dumping it in the patent (in uglier form of course). It is the same as how ridiculous patents are written for software, 'A system comprising of an analog to digital conversion module, a filtering module, a mixing module, a processing modules....blah, blah, blah'. Depending on the interpretation of this ruling (which I don't know enough to comment on), it could impact a lot of patents, both in and out of the software space.
Comments
Yes, but it's about 2 decades too late. All the "...on a computer" patents that cover the big things -- selling books, taking a picture on a white background, measuring distances -- have been done and extracted their costs from the industry and consumers.
I think there is value in this ruling beyond 'what is a computer'. For example I founded a startup a number of years ago to do traffic monitoring with an FMCW radar based sensor. In the process of researching patents in the area I found a bunch of patents that were in effect 'radar applied to traffic monitoring'. IANAL but my interpretation of a large number of them was that they were granted based heavily on block diagrams that 'looked novel' but where really just a matter of taking the block diagram of any old off the shelf DSP SoC and dumping it in the patent (in uglier form of course). It is the same as how ridiculous patents are written for software, 'A system comprising of an analog to digital conversion module, a filtering module, a mixing module, a processing modules....blah, blah, blah'. Depending on the interpretation of this ruling (which I don't know enough to comment on), it could impact a lot of patents, both in and out of the software space.