Savor it: A U.S. Federal Appeals Court just invalidated all business process patents, and it looks like the decision is going to stick. It’s not clear yet how far-reaching this decision will be, or it whether it will have retroactive impact on existing business process patents, but it’s reason to celebrate regardless.

I remember drafting a business process patent, back during the first dot-com boom. It was a for an adaptive system that would reliably strip people’s purchase information from receipts that got over email. It was profitable, maybe, and definitely a little evil. But also seemed quite obvious. I actually asked my boss, “Are we seriously going to get this patent approved?”

“Probably,” he said, “but the point is to create a barrier to entry with the chilling effect, and to create speculative value in case of an acquisition.” I’m paraphrasing, but the point is that this was a patent that rewarded the investment of lawyers, not inventors. It didn’t represent true value, except as a defensive weapon against competitors.

This kind of business practice that later brought me to do an internship at the EFF and get obsessed with intellectual property law reform. The fact is, though, this was the norm at the time. There were a number of court rulings in the 80’s and 90’s that opened the door to a lot of business process patents (e.g. Amazon’s notorious “one-click shopping.”) That legal environment fueled the speculative bubble in the tech industry that blew up on us in 2002. There’s a lot of good history on this subject in [this article by Roger Parloff].(http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/02/28/ending-software-patents-has-the-time-come/)

In any case, this expansion of the scope of patents all occurred in lower courts; the Supreme Court never ruled directly on these issues. In the last couple years, however, SCOTUS has made a number of rulings signaling its displeasure with how badly the patent regime had screwed up the business environment in Silicon Valley, clogging the courts with unnecessary patent cases.

So it may not be a surprise to some, but I’m shocked that we’re actually seeing the tide turning back against business process patents, re-establishing a more balanced regime.

Interestingly, Lessig hasn’t blogged about this yet, but I imagine he’s doing a little jig somewhere, too.

Here are some more details on the ruling, from the first article I linked to:

The Federal Circuit said software and business methods are still patentable but rejected standards set in a 1998 decision that allowed patents on “methods” of doing business so long as the methods involved use of a computer and produced a “useful, concrete and tangible result.” That decision opened the door for patents that had no connection to technological innovation.

“[W]hile looking for ‘a useful, concrete and tangible result’ may in many instances provide useful indications of whether a claim is drawn to a fundamental principle or a practical application of such a principle, that inquiry is insufficient to determine whether a claim is patent-eligible,” the court ruled in the Bilski case.

The decision added, “And it was certainly never intended to supplant the Supreme Court’s test. Therefore, we also conclude that the useful, concrete and tangible result inquiry is inadequate and reaffirm that the machine-or-transformation test outlined by the Supreme Court is the proper test to apply.”

A few years ago, the EFF discovered the serial tracking system that printer makers had been secretly adding to printers at the behest of the government. They’ve just produced this great instructable, with a funny video to boot:

- More cool how to projects

This is an interesting strategy for eliciting online action that I’ve been seeing, lately: Have a video where the talking head actually sits around and waits for you to do something. It creates an artificial social pressure to act.

Here’s MoveOn’s latest email to me, asking for small donations to contested Senate races. Eli Parisier is basically just waiting around for the whole second half of the video. It was weird, but it worked on me:

Here’s a similar tact that I saw, recently:

I went yesterday. Here’s the Flickr photo set. The video’s below:

Logan’s on some sort of extreme sports kick, and he wanted a partner in crime to go skydiving with him. The jump itself was awesome, but it would be expensive to go often, so I’m probably not picking it up as a hobby.

There was an small selection of music we choose from, for our videos. I decided to leave all subtlety behind with Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” and Kanye West’s “Stronger.”

I watched a girl edit ten of these in an hour. They have the whole sequence down to a science, and everyone’s looks exactly the same. For example, stick a camera in someone’s face when they have a flight suit on, and they will give you a thumbs-up. It’s involuntary

Marc sent me this short, autobiographical piece. It’s heartbreaking, scary, and timely:

My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet towards the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That’s the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon—because I’m here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it’s remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying “Duh!” here but you’re probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I’ll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it’s not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.

Look beyond the heartbreak and scariness, however, and you will find some very, very pragmatic pieces of advice. If you want more, check out this guy’s blog which I wrote about a long time ago.

The reports are quite detailed. Here’s the page for all the most recent products. Here’s the PDF for the new MacBook Pro. The Carbon footprint of the MacBook Pro’s entire life cycle is below, for example:

It would be really nice if Apple did analyses on their older products, as well, but they have an incentive (a transparently self-serving one) to keep those less-efficient products and processes hidden.

Regardless, kudos to them for making big efforts to reduce their impact.

The new Macbooks are hot. Get your chuckles on the new manufacturing method, here.

I recently designed an XML API for Instructables. We’ll release the documentation in a bit, once we get some early numbers on how it’s performing, but for now you can already embed a Flash-based Instructable “player” anywhere you like. Here’s an example, from False Profit Labs:

- More cool how to projects

Google News brought me an interesting mention of Instructables.com: A tongue-in-cheek article titled “Survival 101 for the newly poor” about how DIY resources could be useful during our economic crisis.

What with the opportunities to get back into the finance business so limited these days, a career change might be the best option. How about music? A Web site called Instructables.com has complete instructions for making a guitar out of a discarded Altoids box, a ruler, wire and some wing nuts. If things get really desperate the same site has instruction for building a Smith & Wesson M76 look-alike machine gun out of a pencil, several highlighters and some (what else?) duct tape.

Funny, perhaps, but if things really do get bad, perhaps our urban gardening instructables will see an increase in traffic.

UPDATE: Okay, so it’s funny enough that Instructables is actually going to run a “Party Like it’s 1929″ Contest

Fiat has a cool new app called eco:Drive that uses accelerometers to analyze drivers’ efficiency (speed, precision of gear changes, etc.) The data is shared online, letting people compare their driving skill with others and estimate the cost/CO2 savings that they earn by becoming better drivers.

Unfortunately, it only works with specialized hardware in certain Fiat cars. It would be amazing if they could create a tracker that could use the accelerometers now built into any iPod/iPhone, cellphone, or laptop.