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Narrator
Stanford University
00:00:09
Mark Lemley
The Supreme Court this past term had 10 intellectual property cases which is more than they've had in over a century.
00:00:15
Mark Lemley
Intellectual property is patents, copyrights, trademarks all things that are designed to give people protection for their ideas or the things they create.
00:00:26
Mark Lemley
The problem we've got in intellectual property right now is that there's just too much of it. We've seen an explosion in the number of lawsuits filed in patent cases. For instance, to the point where people worry that a system that is designed to encourage innovation might actually be discouraging it instead.
00:00:46
Mark Lemley
Probably the most significant of the Supreme Court's cases in 2014 in intellectual property was the Alice vs CLS Bank case. And in Alice the question was: "What are the limits of patentable subject matter?" Right. What sorts of things are not eligible for patent protection at all?
00:01:02
Mark Lemley
And while the court has refused to say that software or business methods can't be patentable at all, they've imposed in Alice a very restrictive test that most business method and software patents out there in the world today probably don't meet.
00:01:19
Mark Lemley
What the court in Alice said was that an abstract idea-the way in which you solve some problem with software is unpatentable unless it's coupled with an inventive concept: some particular new means of implementing that abstract idea.
00:01:36
Mark Lemley
One of the things we've seen is a wave of decisions by the lower courts that have mostly invalidated a couple of dozen of these patents. And I think there are probably hundreds more such cases coming up in the next year or so.
00:01:50
Mark Lemley
The other thing we've seen is a significant drop in the number of patent lawsuits filed since Alice. It's down 33 percent. And I think what we're seeing is a reaction to the court's conclusion that there are too many software and business method patents and they've claimed too broadly.
00:02:08
Mark Lemley
I think what you what you want is not a pendulum that swings back and forth past the optimum that happens to hit it occasionally in the middle. Right? What you'd like to do is dampen those swings you'd like a system that's closer to balance. Right? That's not wildly overprotective but not wildly under protective either.
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Narrator
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