Justices Question Microsoft's Vision of Patent Law 106
angry tapir writes "US Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned whether they should side with Microsoft and weaken the legal standard needed to invalidate a patent, with some justices suggesting there are alternatives to changing established law. The issue arose as part of the case involving Redmond and i4i."
Microsoft will prevail. (Score:0, Funny)
You just don't mess with Redmond, son.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)
I guess that, in Microsoft's world, you can't patent something after releasing it. i4i isn't so impressed by that idea:
Microsoft's assertions that i4i included the XML editor in a product before applying for the patent and that it destroyed source code are "utter nonsense," Owen added.
Still, this is all just a bucket of dren. No one should be able to patent anything involving XML, and the reasoning is simple: the kind of cruft that accumulates in XML files (and, by extension, application-specific XML parsers) is analogous to biological evolution, and therefore XML is a phenomenon outside of human control. It would be like patenting natural genes or something! And we all know that would never be legalized.