At long last. This has been a tedious but by no means unimportant battle, and I'm glad of the resolution. Oddly, or perhaps it indicates an institutional shift in the scope of patents, the win by Novell comes hot on the heels of the Judge Robert Sweet's invalidation of patents held by Myriad Genetics on breast cancer genes BRCA1 and 2 in a suit filed by the ACLU. (See the useful NYTimes article on the issue; see also NPR's short and very lucid account by Richard Knox.)
Patents issued without heed for social consequences are pernicious. They stymie a host of socially useful activity and production, and to defend them on the very narrow grounds that greed is good for society runs profoundly against what I see as a new awakening to the social contract holding us together.
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