Supreme Court to rule on business method patents

The Supreme Court agreed last week to weigh in on last year's landmark Appeals Court ruling on business method patents.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Supreme Court will hear Bilski v Doll in the fall. Last fall, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that business method patents, which are a mainstay in high-tech companies' intellectual property portfolios, must meet some very strict standards in order to be valid.

The business method patent debate has polarized interested parties into two camps: one side argues that loose standards for business method patents will encourage innovation; the other argues that the opposite is true.

That being the case, even the best writing about this topic that I've seen on the Web is rife with diatribes, so the blogger in me has to cede control to the librarian, and I'm going to recommend reading the Wall Street Journal's coverage of this topic via a library database.

If you have a library card with SFPL, it's easy: just go to the library's Articles and Databases page, click on "Periodical Finder" towards the top, and punch in Wall Street Journal. Scroll down until you see "Wall Street Journal Eastern Edition," and click the link to Proquest Newsstand. Enter your library card number, and you've got full access: no ads, no pop-ups, and, best of all, it's already paid for. Try using these keywords: "bilski" and "patent." (It's worth noting that you can read the WSJ this way every day.)

If you don't have an SFPL library card, there's a good chance you can get to this stuff via your local public library.