I think this description describes an actual "invention" of RLE (although personally I'd still shoot it down on grounds of obviousness). But the average software patent would be written the exact same way and then claim to own "lossless data compression" which is ridiculous. I'm not a lawyer but I'm optimistically reading this as the Supreme Court seeing exactly this distinction and doing the right thing.
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I think this description describes an actual "invention" of RLE (although personally I'd still shoot it down on grounds of obviousness). But the average software patent would be written the exact same way and then claim to own "lossless data compression" which is ridiculous. I'm not a lawyer but I'm optimistically reading this as the Supreme Court seeing exactly this distinction and doing the right thing.