The Court’s mission is to rule on cases brought before it, not to create patent law or to make broad interpretations of the law when a narrow ruling can be applied.
Their narrow ruling avoids conflicts and reflects also the overall conservative approach to law that each Justice has regardless of their “political” conservative or liberal views.
When the court can decide a case using the arguments of opposing counsel, it rules using those arguments and the scope of those arguments without going further.
The Bilski case simply did not provide the broad scope you thought possible. You were looking for something grand and sweeping and did not have the proper narrow legal view of the case in question.
The Court always takes the least necessary steps so that its decisions are clear, firm and applicable to future similar cases. Congress must remedy the patent laws if it can and then the Court will decide future cases using the changed laws. The Court’s view of “similar” is far narrower than you like. Get used to it.
Bruce E. Hogman
Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.
Microsoft’s long game will pay off
It’s funny that right after reading this article, I watched Microsoft’s World Partners Conference keynote where they went over their new Appliance model. In essence, big partners can now run a copy of Azure in their own data centers or the data centers they set up for large customers.
This is most likely going to be very popular with government, financial, medical, and other verticals where data privacy and regulations have prevented migrations to the cloud environments centrally housed by vendors. Salesforce and Amazon provide a free software layer to get customers hooked on up-priced hosting and data transfer. Offering the same Appliance model as Microsoft would require them to look more toward traditional licensing business models.
Microsoft, for now, is willing to forgo hosting/transfer revenues in favor of selling Azure licenses for large-scale private cloud implementers. It’ll pay off.
Paul Katz
LimeLeap Solutions
