*****************AN EXCERPT ******************************
At stake, attorneys on both sides of the case say, are 25 years of patent law and literally tens of thousands of patents on drugs, medical devices, computer software and other inventions. If the court reins in what can be patented, they say, it could be among the most important patent law decisions ever made.
There are a lot of patents that need to be voided. Among other things, the "obviousness" test needs to be revisited to ask something to the effect of "Would this 'invention' be obvious given the existence of the technologies necessary to implement it practically." For many of the patents in existence today, the answer to that question is "yes".
To use an analogy from the early 1700's, it was obvious to many people that if a ship had a clock that could maintain home-port time within a couple minutes' accuracy, without being affected by the movement of the ship, one could use the difference between ship time and home-port time to compute longitude. Nobody thought such a clock could be constructed, but it was obvious to everyone that, if it were, one could compute longitude with it.
Many of today's patent cases could be regarded as being equivalent to someone in 1710 patenting the computation of longitude via timekeeper (without any clue how the timekeeper should be constructed), and then suing John Harrison for patent infringement when he invented a clock that actually worked for that purpose.
Although it should be possible to patent things before all the technologies to make them work are fully practical, the test of novelty for such patents should be stricter than for inventions which are practical from the beginning.