Supreme Court: "willful blindness" to patent infringement not OK

Ars wrote Supreme Court: "willful blindness" to patent infringement not OK.

"An eight-member majority of the high court didn't buy this argument. Justice Alito appealed to the criminal law concept of willful blindness, which holds that defendants cannot escape liability by "deliberately shielding themselves" from relevant facts. The decision built on the 2005 Grokster decision, which held the file-sharing company liable based on evidence that it had deliberately induced its users to infringe copyrights. The concept of willful blindness has not traditionally been used in civil patent cases, but this week's decision changes that."

"It's worth noting how far removed this case was from the kind of software patent dispute we've covered extensively at Ars. In a sane patent system, the kind of direct copying at issue in this case would be the normal sort of dispute, and inadvertent infringement due to independent invention would be the exception. Yet few, if any, of the software patent cases we've covered involve actual copying. Indeed, in the software industry, patent law is usually unnecessary to protect against actual copying of code, because that copying is an infringement of copyright. So patent litigation tends to involve broad patents that numerous companies infringe by accident. Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling helps to limit the damage this type of litigation can do to the software industry."