I was excited to read recently that the Supreme Court ruled favorably for KSR and against Teleflex in a recent court decision. You may be thinking, "Who and who?" Yeah, its not so important who they are, but rather the precedent that was set. Teleflex was claiming that KSR was violating one of its patents, the Supreme Court disagreed stating that the patent was too obvious.

    The idea behind patents (according to my understanding) is to encourage people who come up with inventions that might otherwise be lost after their death to blueprint those ideas, with the guarantee that their invention will be protected from competition for a certain number of years. Its supposed to be a win-win situation for the inventor and society. Sadly, many patents now are for extremely obvious concepts and have significantly hampered technological development as developers have had to carefully tread across the landmine of patents. This ruling will help correct this problem, by pushing patents into the realm they should be in - protecting inventors who create unique inventions that are not quickly and easily reproduced.

    You can read more about this case and its implications in Ars Technica's article.