Poul-Henning wrote:
The Supreme Court recently limited that significantly, buy reiterating that you had to perform _all_ steps of a patent to infringe it:
David wrote:
Bear in mind that not all the steps have to be performed by one entity for infringement to exist.
Poul-Henning wrote:
Did you read the opinion ? I'm asking because it pretty much says the exact opposite...
One always has to be very careful when reading both patents and court opinions. Neither one lends itself to being read for a "plain meaning." We will have to see how the Limelight case develops (i.e., is interpreted in future decisions), but it was issued in a "methods" case (as distinguished from the familiar case of physical widgets) and is probably pretty narrow. The difficulty in the Limelight case was trying to determine what the "whole product" is. (For this and other reasons, a sizeable minority of analysts think that "method" patents should not be allowed in the first place -- similar to the disputes WRT patent protection of algorithms and software.)
For example, the Limelight case gives us no reason to believe that a manufacturer can avoid infringing a patent by having some of the "steps" performed by a subcontractor, who sells a non-infringing (in itself) subassembly to the manufacturer that, when incorporated into a finished product by the manufacturer, practices all of the "steps" of the patent.
Best regards, Charles _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
