SCOTUS makes patent holders happy, upholds $290M Microsoft verdict

SCOTUS makes patent holders happy, upholds $290M Microsoft verdict: "

The United States Supreme Court has ruled against Microsoft in a $290 million patent infringement case related to Microsoft Word. Microsoft had argued that a patent examiner's decision to grant a patent should be given less deference when a jury is considering evidence that had never been considered by the examiner. The high court unanimously rejected this argument, holding that a century of precedents had specified a high standard of proof for invalidating a patent.

In a New York Times op-ed supporting Microsoft, UCLA law professor Doug Lichtman had argued that changing the standard of proof would 'give relief to the countless businesses that today find themselves vulnerable to patents that shouldn't have been issued in the first place.' A wide variety of companies and public interest groups, including Google, Red Hat, Walmart, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation, filed briefs echoing that point. But the Supreme Court decided that whatever the merits of these policy arguments, they couldn't overrule the text of the patent law and the courts' long history of employing the higher standard.