For U.S. high court, a year of discontent with patent rulings

[Wireless News]

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court has shown growing discontent with the country's top patent court, throwing out five of the six rulings it reviewed this year as being too protective of intellectual property rights. Thursday's ruling in a hotly anticipated case, Alice Corp v. CLS Banks, emerged after the patent court, known as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, failed to resolve a key legal question. The patent court had split 5-5, effectively upholding a lower court decision but offering no clear guidance, prompting the Supreme Court to take the case. In Thursday's unanimous decision, the only one to uphold the patent court this year, the Supreme Court modestly cut back on software patents by ruling that simply implementing an abstract idea using a computer does not make an invention eligible to be patented.

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