The Supreme Court granted review today in a patent exhaustion case, Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., S. Ct. Docket No. 06-937.

The Federal Circuit denied the exhaustion defense in the case. LG Electronics, Inc. v. Bizcom Electronics, Inc., 453 F.3d 1364 (Fed. Cir. 2006).

In late August, the SG’s office filed an amicus brief recommending that the Supreme Court grant review in the case. SCOTUSblog reports on and links to this amicus brief here.

More to follow, no doubt …

UPDATE: SCOTUSblog links to the petition and opp here.

The section 101 analysis in In re Comiskey is, rightly, receiving lots of attention.  (Here, for example, is Patently O’s entry on the case (as well as on In re Nuijten).

At least as interesting to me, however, is the panel’s coining a new rule of thumb for nonobviousness analysis.  One might call it the presumptive obviousness of electronification.  To wit:

Here, claims 17 and 46 at most merely add a modern general purpose computer to an otherwise unpatentable mental process and claims 15, 30, 44, and 48 merely add modern communication devices.  The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention typcially creates a prima facie case of obviousness.

Slip op. at 24.  The footnote the court appends at the end of the second sentence just quoted, note 16, states as follows:

See Leapfrog Enters., Inc. v. Fisher-Price, Inc., 485 F.3d 1157, 1161 (Fed. Cir. 2007) (”Accommodating a prior art … device … to modern electronics would have been reasonably obvious to one of ordinary skill in [the art]” because “[a]pplying modern electronics to older … devices has been commonplace in recent years.”); see also KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 127 S. Ct. 1727, 1743-44 (2007) (addition of a well-known electronic sensor to a well-known mechanical adjustable pedal would have been obvious); Dann v. Johnson, 425 U.S. 220, 230 (1976) (finding it obvious to combine the modern computer described in the patent with “existing machine systems in the banking industry”).

Slip op. at 24 n.16.

Perhaps most intriguing is that this rule of thumb appears to be art, and skill-level (?), invariant.  Comiskey is about arbitration, Leap Frog about games, KSR about adjustable gas pedals, and Dann about banking.

I think Judge Linn deserves a special shout out: Thank you, Judge Linn!

Not because his dissent in In re Nuijten has the better of the argument on how to construe section 101 and, thus, on whether the signal claim in the case is patentable (although, after one read through, I think he does have the better of the argument) … but, rather, because his is, I think, the first published court decision (at least, so far as I can verify with Westlaw) that cites to a book on Google Books and gives the url.

On page 7 of his dissent, he states:

One example of a contemporary dictionary is Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (3d ed. 1768), available at http://books.google.com?id=bXsCAAAAQAAJ, which defines manufacture as “[a]ny thing made by art.”

Why am I struck by this?  Because it shows a delightfully high level of reader-friendliness and transparency in judicial writing.

For example, I can go to that book at Google Books, pull up the pertinent page of Johnson’s Dictionary, and see that Johnson actually defined the word “manufacture” in two different ways — one which Judge Linn quotes, and the other which states, “The practice of making any piece of workmanship.”

In a similarly transparent way, eight pages later (on p. 15), Judge Linn cites to a particular statement by counsel at oral argument and refers to the publicly available web-based mp3 file of the oral argument … with a time pinpoint citation.  (As to this helpful citation, he’s not the first. That honor goes to Senior Judge Clevenger … for his unpublished opinion in Franklin Elec. Co. v. Dover Corp., No. 06-1442, 2007 WL 634430 (Fed. Cir. March 1, 2007)).

Lawprofs Matt Sag and Mark Schultz have launched a new blog about fair use and copyright law, called Fairly Useful.

Check it out!

Great story in today’s New York Times about the first International Development Design Summit at MIT this summer.

From the story:

The workshop was developed over the last year by Ms. Smith, Dr. Pickar and others after a meeting to discuss a “design revolution” — a shift in focus among companies, universities, investors and scientists toward attacking problems that hamper development in the world’s poorest places.

“Nearly 90 percent of research and development dollars are spent on creating technologies that serve the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population,” Ms. Smith said. “The point of the design revolution is to switch that.”

She added: “There are several different places where that revolution has to take place. We started thinking, ‘How do we train engineers so they might start thinking of this as a field of engineering they’d want to pursue?’ ”

Fantastic!