We definitely need to revamp patent law, with all these frivolous patents on sandwich making, using a telephone,  email, tax dodges, and other concepts that have nothing to do with original IP and everything to do with making people pay you for their business practices. I just hope that they allow review and elimination of some of the more egregious patents given in recent history.

During hour-long oral arguments in a case that’s closely watched by the business community, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that an existing federal court test for determining patent obviousness relied too little on common sense. Justice Antonin Scalia went so far as to call the test “gobbledygook” and “meaningless.”

“It’s worse than meaningless because it complicates the question rather than focusing on the statute,” Roberts went on to say of the test, which requires evidence of a past “teaching, suggestion or motivation” that would lead to a particular invention in order for it to be declared “obvious.”

The case, rooted in an obscure patent spat about gas pedal designs between the Canadian firm KSR International and Pennsylvania-based Teleflex, has attracted the attention of high-tech, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other patent-dependent firms because because it addresses one of the fundamental questions in patent law: What makes an invention, particularly a combination of existing parts, too “obvious” to warrant protection?

Let’s hope that we can be rid of the crap in patent law without gutting real protection for original ideas. Any reform could also swing too far to the point where real creative work could be stolen with impunity.