Supreme Court ruling fallout: fewer patents, more litigation?

By Chris Murphy, Courtesy of InformationWeek
May 2 2007 (14:45 PM)

This week's Supreme Court ruling on patents is sure to affect companies in software and other areas of IT, where some of the most controversial patents have been issued and litigated in recent years.

Patent attorneys are predicting it will be harder to protect inventions after the ruling in KSR vs. Teleflex, that there will be more litigation to contest patents, and that even existing patents could become less valuable. "It's going to be much harder to get patent protection on everything, including software," said Steven Rubin, an intellectual property attorney with the firm WolfBlock, in an interview.

Vonage on Tuesday used the ruling to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals to toss out the ruling that it infringed on patented Verizon technology. That ruling put Vonage's viability in jeopardy.

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