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Bilski - What It Means, Part 4 - The Microsoft Brief

By Pamela Jones et al.

I said I'd write next about Microsoft in my series of articles trying to explain what In Re Bilski means. I also said it would be the last in the series, but it's not. I'm sorry it took me so long, but I decided as I was constructing the article that without the full text of the amicus brief Microsoft filed in the Bilski case, it was almost impossible to be comprehensible. So I took the time to do the text version of the PDF. You'll also want to have the decision [PDF] itself handy. The text version we did of the Bilski decision is here.

The Microsoft brief was filed along with Dell and Symantec, and it's an attempt to get the court to deny the Bilski claims while at the same time trying to keep the court from going all the way and deciding software should not be patentable. There are some logic bumps along the way, as you will see. The court diverged from Microsoft's argument about three-quarters of the way through, and it didn't directly address software patents, except in one footnote, mainly because Bilski wasn't about software. So it left unaddressed Microsoft's chief argument about why software should patentable, namely because of what it does to a computer. There will be future cases, though, that certainly will be on this point, so it seems a good time to point out everything we can think of to help the court understand what's wrong with the Microsoft-Dell-Symantec position. I'll start, but jump in any time. You'll see more than I will, since so many of you are programmers.

I'm smiling already just thinking about it. Anyway, what I thought would be just one article is now two, because of the length. Here, I'll just address what I understand Microsoft's arguments to be and what a "particular machine" is to Microsoft. I'll save the part about what it may mean for Microsoft's threats against Linux for the next article.

Full post as published by Groklaw on November 12, 2008 (boomark / email).